


running after two hares

by chaparral_crown



Category: Charlie Countryman (2013), Hannibal (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Crack Treated Seriously, Green Card Jokes, Hannibal Lecter Loves Will Graham, Jealousy, Learning to Navigate Same Sex Marriage as Newly Minted Bisexuals, M/M, Mail Order Brides, Now With More Ex-Soviets, Season/Series 02, Threesome - M/M/M, Will Graham Helps Himself
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-10-04
Updated: 2021-01-30
Packaged: 2021-03-07 19:33:43
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 8
Words: 59,631
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26822959
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/chaparral_crown/pseuds/chaparral_crown
Summary: “Do you think that maybe you have a preference for people with a certain criminal element?”Will feels himself wilt internally. “I’m not sure how to feel about jumping to murder instead of the fact that the two of you could have been made through cellular mitosis.”---Hannibal has effectively replaced Will in every facet of his life by the time he is released from prison at the hands of the Chesapeake Ripper. The man takes his job, his friends, his one-time crush, and his pride.In a spiteful random purchase made at a gas station, Will finds a way for two to play that game, and puts in motion a much wilder method of replacing Hannibal than he was really planning for.
Relationships: Will Graham/Hannibal Lecter, Will Graham/Hannibal Lecter/Nigel (Charlie Countryman), Will Graham/Nigel (Charlie Countryman)
Comments: 1060
Kudos: 1081





	1. a sketchy offer from the magazine rack

**Author's Note:**

> Welcome to the Season 2 Mail Order Bride AU nobody asked for.  
> No, I'm not sorry. No, I can't stop myself.

  
  
  


“You found a way to hurt me, Will. I wonder how many more people are going to be hurt by what you do,” says Hannibal. 

Will, behind the bars of the cage, wants to laugh at that. What’s a couple of long scratches down the arm next to the disappointment of abandonment? Medical malpractice? Turning all his friends against him, and he guesses what sounds like taking his job? Promising him some kind of security that never really manifests?

( _Leaving you more alone than you’ve ever been?_ )

What could he possibly do next that’s worse than anything else so far? Maybe take his dogs in, Will supposes. Graffiti of “Will Graham Sucks” doesn’t seem quite in Hannibal’s taste, but Will has taken pretty much every corpse that has dropped at Hannibal’s hand since Will’s incarceration to essentially be that anyway. He doesn’t really have a girlfriend to steal - the only person he’s considered in recent recall thought he was crazy even before Hannibal got to him, but hey, far be it for Hannibal to not find another way to twist the knife. 

Hannibal makes Will feel replaceable in everything he does. 

Will’s not sure how to pay that back, but he’s going to. 

\---

Release from prison would be a relief if it was for any reason other than what it is: permission to go, at no success or effort of his own, like he's been an errant schoolboy sitting in the corner while the adults talk. The Chesapeake Ripper sets him free, because the Chesapeake Ripper is tired of playing games without the audience to see how well he’s doing everything in Will’s name. Every work table, bench, power tool, and cistern in the barn where Miriam Lass is found screams this, as obviously amused as any crude joke spray-painted on a wall. Will wants to burn it down and leave, feeling like the butt of a joke. Fortunately, Jack seems more or less satisfied with his assessments. 

Now, just to get home to something that’s still his.

Will’s home is very empty the first time he comes back to it. This is reasonable - it has been three months since he’s been in it, and Will Graham, consummate bachelor and consistently alone despite his worst attempts with his only ( _living_ ) female friend and best attempts with his closest ( _liar of a_ ) confidante, has no one to tend his hearth. He has a lot of things to do to set things to rights. He just needs to get the hell home first to do it. 

He is dropped at the end of the lane by a taxi driver who is none too pleased to be going from a rural road near Leesburg to the suburbs of Wolf Trap. Will figures this is somewhat fair - picking up a recently released ex-convict from an active crime scene of the Chesapeake Ripper at Jack Crawford’s behest is hardly a shining example of clients you want to have. He drives around like Will is a hive of bees that has been put in the back seat and shaken vigorously. Will, the proverbial hive of bees in question, spends the majority of the drive in a state of nausea thanks to the speed at which said taxi driver would like to be free of his burden. He is profoundly more sympathetic towards bees by the time the white paint of the farmhouse rises up from the snowy fields, both in that there’s nothing he’d like so much as to sting the hell out of something, and in that he would be safest in his home. 

He counts out twenty dollar bills in payment given to him by the discharge officer before Jack picks him up to go on a merry jaunt to the Virginia cabin, and only avoids flipping the driver off by merit of not wanting it to get back to anyone. He doesn't need anymore strikes against his character this month, thank you very much. When the tires of the cab peel down the dirt road, only then does he feel comfortable enough to sigh, and head properly to the door. 

Well, he would, if he could get in it. It turns out that the FBI cleaners are pants-on-head stupid. They are stupid because when Will kicks over a rock in the front garden bed just beneath the stairs to the porch, and his spare key is nestled in the ice and mud beneath it, he is still not able to enter the house. They have locked the storm door from the inside, which has a knob lock and no key. The key under the rock is for the house door, which he cannot reach. Someone literally had to turn the knob lock from _inside_ the house, step outside, and close it behind them, instead of using _the key they had been given_. He sighs.

So Will climbs into the house through the loose window on the second floor. He slips twice getting on the porch roof, swearing wildly, but thankfully breaks nothing major. Just walking with fair weather shoes that the mental hospital gave him on top of ice, not a big deal, nobody rush to help him.

( _There’s nobody here to help, dumbass, your mind unhelpfully supplies._ ) 

He sighs again, when he finally slides through the bottom of a bedroom window to the hardwood floor. It’s cold enough in the house to see his breath. So he guesses he needs to start there.

Will thinks how nice it would have been if someone was inside to unlock the door, or keep the place warm, and that just makes him even more irritable, relighting the pilot light of the heater, taking stock of the absence of the dogs, and the absence of feeling at home. He takes stock of the emptiness of the kitchen, and that no one has called him, and that there’s a lot of things he can blame Hannibal for, but this was never one of them.

\---

Getting his car going again requires the rest of the afternoon, and to add insult to injury, a trip to the gas station that is done with an abundance of prayers over the fuel tank’s empty light - seems no one bothered to check that his car was in working order, the same way that the wrong damn door was locked. He makes it, but just barely, and stomps into the convenience store to get his change and a snack to make the trip back to the house.

A magazine in the gas station glares up at him from the racks, just to the left of the candy bars, energy drinks, and questionable erectile supplements. On its cover, a lovely woman in a tan sweater, perfect teeth, and a well-groomed golden retriever. 

The woman’s picture is undoubtedly airbrushed, but Will fixates for a moment on the fact that they have done the same to the dog, who doesn’t have even the vaguest suggestion of ever having had contact with dirt, slobber, or grime. Having seen how the dogs eat on hundreds upon hundreds of occasions, scarfing down dry kibble so fast that their eyes water, this feels like the actual lie rather than the woman’s pearly veneers. The other actual lie is the headline to the right of said teeth. **_How My Marriage Saved My Life: Stories of European Women Moving to the US to Find Love._ **

_Goodness_ , thinks Will. _If only I tried the mystic forces of marital obligations to keep my life together. Maybe_ **_then_ ** _I wouldn’t be a felon with a food motivated stalker._

He snorts, and picks it up to flick through the pages. Just for a giggle. He’s in need of a good one, his own in incredibly short supply these days. 

It’s not so much a magazine as it is a long-form advertisement for a matchmaking service. There’s a number of frolicking young women with blonde hair and tasteful black boots on the interior. None of them actually have dogs. Maybe Will has underestimated what a good hook that is for the average American male, and that he’s not actually exceptional in that regard, though exceptions are required for his essentially hoarding them.

Will buys it, thinking to have some more giggles at home. It costs $3.99, and dumps a half dozen postcard vouchers for different subscription services all over the cab of his car. ( **_Speak to your sweetie!_ ** _says one._ **_Tour the Baltic Sea with Romance and Adventure!_ ** _says another._ **_HOT GIRLS WAITING FOR YOU_ ** _says a lime green one that you physically recoil from._ ) The elderly cashier, when she rings up the change for Will’s gas, a bag of potato chips, and a bottle of Wild Turkey with the magazine, makes a face that suggests something along the lines of _go figure_. 

“What, you mean you never read a tabloid for laughs?” he says around a biting grimace, embarrassed for half a second. 

“Buncha ladies tryin’ to get out of communism doesn’t sound like a laugh to me,” she grouses, and hands him back his change with broad fingers, rings swollen to the joints. “T’sa big risk, marryin’ someone you don’t know.” 

Fair enough, though Will has to forcefully close his mouth to stop himself from explaining that there aren’t really any Communist countries in Europe, that’s not what social democracies are, and Communism isn’t that bad in a Utopian theory kind of way. This is all way more than he needs to discuss with the cashier of the local Shell station, and he’s yet to win this argument with his own father, so Will shrugs, taking his ill-chosen swag out to the car. He only swears mildly when all the detritus inside the magazine takes over the passenger seat.

Alana’s not bringing the dogs until tomorrow, and he could use some entertainment that doesn’t have anything to do with arguing semantics of the political systems of eastern Europe, Jack Crawford’s trainee, or Hannibal fucking Lecter. 

\---

Will Graham knows he has an obsessive personality. This typically manifests in things that are generally perceived as cute in children, and wholeheartedly disturbing in adults if it’s not over things like gardening, or stamp collecting, or at your most fringy something like Fibonacci sequences. Will, not being a typical man, has managed to keep most of his obsessive moments contained to practical application, like learning the best times to cast for trout during a summer run by maintaining an immaculate spreadsheet, or his stint with learning all the ins and outs of the life cycle of clothes-moths by literally buying a number of livestock carcasses that hadn’t been degloved to see what rate the moths would consume the hair on desiccated corpses.

( _That last one requires too much biochemistry explanation to go over casually. You’re pretty sure you lost a potential girlfriend over that discussion once._ ) 

As such, giggles, just as much as work pursuits, have a way of turning things that were done ironically into things done with all due seriousness. Some little detail, or cross reference, or counter argument sends him spiralling into considerations of the who, when, where, whys of the subject at hand. Not everything has to be a Garrett Jacob Hobbs, or a Copycat Killer to get his attention.

The magazine, when he dug into it initially, was platitudes and not really worth the 4 bucks it cost. Happy endings orchestrated by middle-aged men with modest middle-class income who were ok with marrying for company and hoping that security became something like love. All the women are gorgeous, and all the men drive BMWs, and everyone is planning on going on holiday to the Balkans to meet the parents. 

This is probably how Will finds himself at 2 in the morning reading scholarly articles on the benefits of mail-order marriage arrangements, because he can’t really buy into the glossy picture they’re painting for him, but it’s also a time honored American tradition. God knows there wasn’t enough people in the old days to propagate the ol’ stars and stripes. These days, god knows there’s not enough people regardless of gender for Will to settle down with unless he looks internationally, where they don’t care about recent local headlines. ( _The people you thought you liked most insisted you killed a girl, and had you sent to prison. It doesn’t matter who lied and who didn’t. Hard to get back in the game after that. Any game. Dating games. Head games. Basketball._ ) 

( _Scratch that. Have you ever played basketball in your entire life?_ ) 

He also finds quite a bit of material to suggest the men ordering said marriageable persons trended towards cruel or controlling or violent, and while Will hasn’t really been seriously considering the prospect of saving his life through marriage, no matter what the magazine cover promises, it does make him tap his fingers on the kitchen table in irritation to match one of three observably undesirable traits. 

Nonetheless, the obsession marches on. He loads up another one of the advertised websites, something very cheeky and pleased with itself, the URL shining out from his laptop screen: **_SecretOperation.Ro/mance_ **. 

It definitely sounds like he’s going to get an exotic computer virus, or begin his very recent lifelong dream of getting kidnapped and never having to deal with his so-called friends and coworkers ever again, but Will is also not a moron and can do basic Google searches for domain names - all the people listed in this particular “secret operation” are Romanian, and all the external forum reviews of the place seem to be on the up and up, insofar as ordering a spouse online is. With all the primary colors spread out in the webpage, it looks like a very fanciful Mondrian painting, only, you know, potentially a type of human trafficking. 

The profiler in him always wants to know who these people are. At what point did they decide to do this? How bad are your relationships and prospects at home to want to green card your way to happiness? (“ _Oh me, me, ask me!” you think._ ) Who’s taking pictures from their family holiday parties and making it their headshot for some foreigner to check them out as a marriage prospect? Aren’t they standing next to a sibling at their graduation? Did they crop their ex-lover out of that one, where the edge is too close to a fair-skinned cheek? Divorced of the emotion, it reminds Will a lot of getting photos from victim’s families, just the highlights of a fairly mediocre life. 

The stinging look from the gas station attendant comes to mind, as profiles for rows and rows of women come up. Next to each, a tidy summary of their life: where they live, how old they are, if they went to school, and what they like to do. A big red button at the bottom of each says “Get in Contact with Me!”

The first on the list, a round faced girl with a pretty gap-toothed smile:

**_Alexandra_ **

**_Lives in:_ ** _Constanța_

 **_Age:_ ** _32_

 **_Education:_ ** _Universității Ovidius Constanța_

 **_Alexandra Likes:_ ** _Sailing on Holiday and beaches! I grow up in Constanța. I look forward to travel and learning new things with you. I will teach you to sail like the men of my family._

Alexandra sounds nice. Alexandra sounds like a small town girl living in a small town world, and someone like Will, looking into this tiny window of life, is her best opportunity to get away from it, the need to leave stronger than the comfort of staying. At 32, old enough to know this could be a bad idea, but old enough to be willing to risk it. Will thinks he must be lonelier than he thought - he’s not opposed to being taught how to sail like he lives on the Black Sea, and she’s not wildly outside his own age range.

He shakes his head. 

Feeling progressive, and not wanting to prove some old crone working the mid shift at the register, Will clicks to display both men and women. Clearly, **_SecretOperation.Ro/mance_ ** also considers themselves equal opportunity matchmakers. Why the hell not? Might as well get a complete picture, even if it only expands the results by a couple pages at most. 

He doesn’t really pay attention to the photos anyway, eyes glued to the written description and hobbies to the right hand side.

**_Mihaela_ **

**_Lives in:_ ** _Brașov_

 **_Age:_ ** _37_

 **_Education:_ ** _Ion Mincu University of Architecture and Urbanism_

 **_Mihaela Likes:_ ** _I did my university courses in Architecture, and love the Black Church in my city! I am a researcher who wants to start new studies on American structures - maybe you can show me buildings in your hometown as a date?_

Mihaela is getting along in age like Will. Consummate scholar. Has traveled and gotten away from family, but wants the comfort of a solid home base to operate from. Can’t afford to move to the States on a graduate researcher’s pay - looking for an opportunity, not a husband. 

**_Ioanna_ **

**_Lives in:_ ** _București_

 **_Age:_ ** _23_

 **_Education:_ ** _Universitatea Spiru Haret Bucureşti_

 **_Mihaela Likes:_ ** _Hiking and animals! I finish my programme this year in Animal Medicine, and love farms. I was raised on a potato farm with pigs and sheep, and think it’s a good life. I make a great Cornulețe - the envy of every party. ;)_

Ioanna is either not a real person, has no idea what kind of man she’ll appeal to in the age bracket that can afford to pay for a very young wife and a green card, or will be very happy to disappear and live in a commune in Iowa. Will feels somewhat like he’s just seen a baby cousin flirting with old men at the bar, and considers closing the screen. 

**_Nigel_ **

**_Lives in:_ ** _București_

 **_Age:_ ** _44_

 **_Education:_ ** _Fuck that._

 ** _Nigel_** **_Likes:_** _Cocaine, if we’re being honest. Marriages should be honest right? Hope you like honesty too, because I like that as well. No cheaters, no artist’s temperaments, just someone who likes to have a good time, and appreciates loyalty. You don’t always have to be down to fuck, but I am. Peace and love, ladies and gentlemen._

Nigel has been burnt in a previous relationship, the faithful man in an unfaithful vocation probably, judging by the disdain for higher education. ( _You feel that. Far be it for you to condemn people’s vices and blue collar upbringings. Everyone’s just getting by._ ) This is posted as a dare, or a manic episode, or Nigel is in some legal trouble and figures it's worth a shot. Could be all three. Will smiles. 

As the first man in the list, Will can’t help but look to the side and see who in their right mind would write this and expect results. In his periphery, the only thing he really catches is a bad polaroid of a man with sandy hair, a crooked smile, and a very cavalier grip on a cigarette. 

Will properly focuses. 

Jesus Christ, it’s Hannibal. 

\---

It’s embarrassing to admit Will slams closed the laptop, like he’s been seen. 

He opens it again. Nigel continues to stare out of the LED screen with Hannibal’s face, enjoying a cigarette like it’s his god given right. That...doesn't really track with Hannibal's tastes, even if it tracks with his shameless right to literally everything on God's green earth. Nigel smiles wider and more openly than Hannibal does. Nigel seems to have a neck tattoo and is not afraid of a short-sleeved button up, where Hannibal would probably implode into flame if someone saw his ankles without proper trouser socks and sock garters. Nigel looks like he's actually kind, not just playing at it. 

Will slams it closed again. 

He opens it, rereads the description, and closes it again. 

Statistically speaking, there’s probably a few people who look like Hannibal out there. There’s entire fields of study dedicated to the facial structure by ethnic genotype. Will’s not made a dedicated study of Hannibal’s background, only that a random Romanian in the scrolled depths of a mail-order spouse website probably has some kind of chance to meet that criteria. Will’s already had an incredibly rare disease of the brain, a one-of-a-kind empathy disorder, and had the terrible fortune to encounter more serial killers in person than a Wikipedia page for a country’s total known ones. So why stop at the possibility of finding Hannibal’s southeast European doppelganger mere hours after his release from prison?

He should have bought a lottery ticket. 

He contemplates if it's a joke for a full ten minutes before he has to shake his head at the absurdity of that. Hannibal’s a good planner, one of the best, but even Will can’t think he’s this good. To put a magazine in a random Shell station, know Will would purchase it, look up one of _several_ webpages, and even maybe be willing to look at the dudes in addition to the dames...well that’s beyond Hannibal’s ken, terror of a man or not. 

Whoever Nigel is, he’s his own person, separate from the maniac of Chandler Square. He is having a hard time after a relationship. He is probably a criminal offender of a different sort. He is crass. He smokes. He has low morals, but strict expectations. He hasn’t stolen a face, but he certainly shares one - Hannibal would likely hate it if he knew.

( _It warms you somewhere in the pit of your stomach to know Hannibal lives in duplicate somewhere, looking as tired as you, and is tired of people, or at least tired of where he is and the people there._ ) 

\---

When Alana returns the dogs, she apparently makes it a point to also return any sort of attempts at a peaceful transfer. Will is happy to see every little snouted face, including Applesauce who doesn’t belong to him but is a good girl, and well behaved with the pack. It grieves him a little to know she’ll be lonely with his seven returned to him. Alana, however, seems to be happy to cut things off early. 

“I was wrong about you,” she says, and Will expects a drawn out explanation of his innocence, but what he gets is a lecture about Hannibal being this, and Hannibal being that. 

( _You know Hannibal is a lot of things. Murderer, betrayer, doctor, gastronomist, one time friend, one time ally in arms and thought. What’s a couple of scars between people like that? You took a bullet to tell him what you actually thought of him, and he took a couple of long runs of the knife up his arms to know you’re a murderous piece of shit yourself when it comes down to it. You don’t know what you would have done if Hannibal had been properly dispatched. You still don’t know what life after prison is shaped like after him._ )

What does come as a surprise is that she’s seeing Hannibal. 

( _It once had been shaped like him - scratch that for now._ )

He’s surprised to find he’s more upset about Hannibal seeing her, than Alana seeing him. Another thing stolen, another way he's easily replaced. Will sits on that, hunched in the snow, petting furry faces and feeling the balls of his feet sink further into the slush and mud.

( _So not only do the people you like best think you’re sick, or lying to say that you are, they’re now also probably sleeping with each other. No room for you. Go back to your lonely frontier, or order your companion by mail like the old days. Nobody is friends with each other after all._ ) 

When her little Prius disappears down the drive, Will escorts the dogs back inside as one escorts lords returning to the estate, promising warm beds, and dinner, and as much time as he can spare before the next call from Jack or social inconvenience that has surely been preplanned like everything else so far. Each wagging tail is thrilled to go through the door with the certainty that this is where they belong, and that Alana is very nice, but this is home. They give chase to each other, run circles on the bed, twist between his legs unapologetically, and take every opportunity to get into Will's face when he kneels down to give one of them attention. All the dogs are very happy for it, and anxiously push each other out of the way to receive it. 

They’re not useful per se - no one’s going to exactly start the shower for him so the pipes can warm up, or pull something out of the freezer to dethaw. There will be no home repairs under Winston’s watch, or phone calls to tell him that they’ll be by in an hour or so. Zoe can’t make a great Cornulețe like Ioanna, whatever the fuck that is, and Max has no thoughts on the Black Church like Mihaela and Will suspects he doesn’t have a keen sense of the differences between shade and color, but alas. 

He does wish they could talk to him, or give him something a bit beyond their constancy. There are seven of them, and they love him and he loves them in turn, but not a one of them understands him or provides any sort of support. 

Will guesses Alana and Hannibal don’t either, not really. He mulls that over a glass of the Wild Turkey, passing absent fingers over the crests of Winston’s ears, and Buster’s back where he sits in Will's lap. 

He should stop Hannibal from hurting anyone else. Alana doesn’t deserve to be debased in the name of whatever game Hannibal is playing these days with Jack and Miriam Lass, even if she does think she knows better than him and that giving Hannibal a scarce moment of fear is somehow worse than the possibility that Hannibal sent him to prison and made him think he committed a string of murders across the eastern reaches of the United States. ( _She has a PhD in Psychiatry, but she doesn’t see how stupid that is? You can barely contain your anger with her - ignorance is a higher crime than deceit._ ) That would be the right thing to do. It would be some kind of justice to just make this train wreck roll to a stop.

He puts the glass of Wild Turkey down on the magazine. **_How My Marriage Saved My Life!_ **

Will gets angrier the longer he looks, and the angrier he gets, the easier the bourbon goes down, and the further away the thought of driving himself up to Baltimore to express exactly how he feels to the person that makes him feel that way becomes. Fuck those people who don’t think about him. Everyone’s interchangeable. Will is living proof. 

Picking up the pile of postcard advertisements, Will thinks, dangerously: I can do the same to them.

\---

The website fuckers make him pay $500 to even send a message to anyone on the website, nevermind all the other rules and regulations he has to agree to when signing up for the first time. 

This makes practical business sense, but three glasses in after staring down the charming veneers and sterile fur of the golden retriever for the better part of an hour feeling sorry for himself, Will is not really enjoying the online shopping experience. Will is taking the bait, and pulling the line on a gas station purchase made over potato chips and cheap alcohol. 

Article after article of happy people tells him he has been promised a spouse, a BMW, and to meet the parents in the Balkans, and god dammit, if that’s what it takes for some normalcy around here where your psychiatrist friends don’t decide to fuck over the memory of your friendship with them ( _him, you mean him really_ ), then you’ve got credit cards, a valid tax address as a single person, a titled deed to your house, and a chip on your shoulder that says a nicer person from eastern Europe is welcome to ride your income for three years or longer, because fuck them. 

It's on repeat. _You can replace them. You can replace them._

Will scrolls to the last profile he reads, where Hannibal's face stares up at him with a rakish smile: 

**_Nigel_ **

**_Lives in:_ ** _București_

 **_Age:_ ** _44_

 **_Education:_ ** _Fuck that._

 ** _Nigel_** **_Likes:_** _Cocaine, if we’re being honest. Marriages should be honest right? Hope you like honesty too, because I like that as well. No cheaters, no artist’s temperaments, just someone who likes to have a good time, and appreciates loyalty. You don’t always have to be down to fuck, but I am. Peace and love, ladies and gentlemen._

It's an irony of the universe that he can replace one of them almost literally.

It feels like justice.

Will clicks the red button, message window coming up, his newly minted status as a paid user signed in the corner with a star and his name, _Will, Virginia, USA._

This is a bad idea, comes the thought, a last warning before pushing off into new waters. This is picking a fight over someone you know, with a third party that knows nothing of his troubles or his social mishaps, or how big of a mess he is and all the people he surrounds himself with. This is a person who probably has good intentions, even if Will doesn’t, and doesn’t know if he ever will. Will could leave them out, to be happy, and find another well meaning lonely person in the countryside of the United States who’s as socially inept as him and has to resort to a gas station magazine to find someone to be less lonely with.

( _Hope you like honesty, it reads, and you_ **_want_ ** _it, so bad._ ) 

**_Two questions,_ ** he types between crossed eyes, going as quick as he can before his courage fails him. **_First, how do you feel about living with seven dogs, and secondly, how do you feel about living with a man?_ **

\---

He wakes with a pounding headache, and an email notification. Will's almost afraid to open it, but morbid curiosity gets the better of him before the shame of even getting into this mess can come online with the rest of his hungover brain. 

**_I love dogs,_** it says.

Well, that's a start, Will guesses. He continues:

**_Fuck me, I guess I did write gentlemen in my profile, didn’t I? Men aren’t generally to my taste, but I guess never say no before seeing what’s on offer. So I don’t know, are you cute, Will in Virginia USA, or are you some old fuck?_ **

Will, severely out of his element, a little embarrassed with himself, a little intimidated by Nigel's photo glaring out at him with a face that he used to think he trusted, and uncertain what even qualifies for cute in the male to male community or how it varies from women to men, contemplates a reply. He certainly feels like an old fuck, but Nigel from Bucharest is older than him and doesn’t appear to be in a stable relationship, so who’s the real old fuck here? 

The profile picture, so startlingly similar to Hannibal but so clearly not him, is unwavering and smug from the corner of the message log. The sweep of bangs over a proud face. The look of someone who has high hopes, but low expectations, and that Will can offer something that he wants, and what a novelty that is. 

**_Want to find out?_ ** he types, and feels a little thrill to know he'll get a reply. 


	2. a questionable purchase by phone

Nigel is a hard man to get a hold of. In a rare twist of fate, it doesn’t seem to be Will’s fault by merit of being a total anti-social asshole, which Nigel doesn’t know yet, or Nigel’s fault, who is brief but actually pretty gung-ho about talking if his reply is anything to go by.

**_That’s the spirit. Don’t leave me in the dark too long now, Will._ **

For a man allegedly not that into men, he seems to be something of a flirt. Will just smiles wryly when he sees it, and contemplates whether or not he’s being taken advantage of. He pushes past the consideration - in for a penny, in for a pound after all. He’s got some work to do if he’s about to go exploring the path of an anchor husband, barring the internal panic at the idea of actually going through with this to the next step. The sexuality crisis can wait, though Will has no doubt that it's coming. 

It’s a fair bit more complicated to actually get in contact with someone after the initial simple messages, which appears to be by design. There’s no way to support image attachments and video chats, and the number of communications are limited and strictly monitored to keep people from circumventing the greater mail order spouse financial industry, and also to keep them from killing each other through elaborate interagency checks on Will’s criminal background. This seems prudent. Will is one of many unsavory characters - it's only fair that Nigel, age 44, gets to decide if Will Graham is too big a bite to take in exchange for American citizenship. 

He flags Nigel’s profile as someone he would like to speak with further. This is done by checking a box that says **_♥ It’s a Match! ♥_ ** , which makes Will internally gag, and also triggers an email to him that, to no one’s surprise, is a series of additional forms to make sure he doesn’t have a violent history and hasn’t been petitioning for multiple foreign marriages. It’s kind of inconvenient; Will does have a history ( _thanks Hannibal_ ), with almost all instances of charges being dropped or dismissed, but they’re outlined for all to see on the register of the Maryland State court records. Surprise, surprise, it’s still illegal to break out of police custody, even if you are innocent of all charges filed. 

( _Nigel, you note, gets a free pass on the background check. You wonder at that, but you also don’t - you know there’s something there, but you’ve seen the worst of people before, and it’s nice to not have to read it out in a rap sheet, or have your life turned upside down to figure it out at the worst possible moment. Garden variety problematic is an absolute upgrade._ ) 

Will, starting to get used to people being contrary with him for calling things what they are both professionally and personally, nods his way through a phone call with the American coordinators of **_SecretOperation.Ro/mance_ ** the way that one nods through mandatory HR seminars. He is told that it will be his job to take the next step in his "relationship". He is also informed under no uncertain terms that he is being a cretin by using “mail order spouse” as a phrase. 

“Mr. Graham, the term we use is international marriage broker,” says a woman that introduces himself as Petra, and nothing further than that. “We help connect people the same way any other dating service does.” 

“With the express intention to marry and use the naturalization laws of the destination country, at an exorbitant cost next to traditional online dating services,” Will snipes, eyes rolling unseen as he paces the living room. 

“Well yes,” she says. 

“So to be pedantic, you’re saying I should say email-order spouse.”

The typing coming from the other end of the receiver is violent - Will prays for their keyboard quietly, but rolls his eyes harder. “I don’t think you’re taking this very seriously, Mr. Graham," comes the reply "No one is being purchased or coerced. We’re very serious about our customers making healthy connections before committing to anything legally binding.” 

Will, originally not taking much of anything seriously but now having to actually do so with his criminal background and billing information on file, sighs. “Alright, understood,” he says. “So then about the cost of the _healthy connection_ of the video call…” 

Keeping on theme, the cost is indeed exorbitant, but thankfully the last threshold to cross to get a private email to contact Nigel at, and a full name - Nigel Paraschiv, who appears to live in an older area of Bucharest, judging by a hastily made search on a map. So, he’s not exactly without means of his own, even if he is playing at potential husband to erstwhile American losers. Will files that away to parse later. 

(“ _No phone number?” you ask, and the connection coordinator just says “that guy doesn’t keep the same one for long.” Another data point._ ) 

The whole thing is fucking bizarre, but it will be marginally less so to leave behind the corny matchmaking themes and the extortionate middle man practices. Maybe it would feel less forbidden if they stopped treating it like it was. 

\---

Just after midday, three days after buying his magazine, two days after getting his dogs back and sending his first message in a frantic mess of feelings, one day after speaking to the incredibly self-righteous and sketchy website staff, Will sends an email to Nigel. He waits a day from when he gets the contact information because it feels a little desperate to do it all in one day; he hates looking too eager. Three days still isn’t much time, and Will thinks he does anyway.

Everything feels more real from the clean white interface of his own screen, somehow less lurid than the bright squares of the _international marriage broker’s_ website. It takes some of the surreality away - this is something that is actually happening. Will stares for the better part of an hour at the computer with a new draft open. 

( _You are now at 3 days and 1 hour - you are the pinnacle of restraint, aren’t you?_ ) 

How does one ask to put eyeballs on each other’s faces to verify you are not being catfished by your ex-psychiatrist, and to prove that you are not a morally bankrupt undesirable forever alone bachelor? Will’s not even sure if that’s not true, but he’s already invested in watching this mistake unfold, so Will eventually types out:

**_To:_ ** **_fridaysson@posta.r_** ** _o_** ** _,_ **

**_From:_ ** **_grahamws@_ ** **_gwu.edu_ **

**_Subject: “Is Will Graham an Ugly Old Fuck?”_ **

**_I hope to god they kick some of the money to get an email address your way. Otherwise we’ve both been taken for a ride._ **

**_Are you open to video chat? I figure that’s the fastest way for you to make a decision on if this fuck is too gentlemanly for your aesthetics. I wake up early, so I guess whatever works for you._ **

As an afterthought: 

**_Sorry about my background check. They send you that, right? I know it’s probably a mess to read. No hard feelings if it’s a bit much for your tastes, more so than the being a guy part._ **

**_-Will, Virginia, USA, questionably cute._ **

He closes the computer, feeling anxious the way that job interviews feel. Or first dates. Or first time colonoscopies. Theoretically, it could be very similar to all three if he really puts his best effort into it. But what’s the worst that can happen, he be $1500 in the hole for what started as a glorified midnight rager on Romanian People Amazon?

( _Yes. Yes, that would be the worst. Yes, that would validate that even if there is a perfect replica of Hannibal out there, there’s a good chance that he’s made of the same stuff as the original, and he can refuse you as well._ ) 

He skips lunch. He walks the dogs. He feels like an idiot having an identity crisis, and then he feels resentful all over again and committed to whatever comes after. 

\---

Three hours later, in what Will assumes to be the wee hours of the Romanian nighttime, a reply: 

**_To:_ ** **_grahamws@_** ** _gwu.edu_ **

**_From:_ ** **_fridaysson@posta.ro_**

**_Subject: Re: “Is Will Graham an Ugly Old Fuck?”_ **

**_You don’t take very long to make a decision, do you?_ **

Incredibly inaccurate, thinks Will, for all but the worst of decisions. 

**_I keep my word - never would have signed up here if I wouldn’t entertain the idea. Apologies are also unnecessary, as I find your ability to kick your way out of a police escort infinitely more attractive than good behavior or that fucking website’s idea of proper conduct. What’s life without a few teeth taken between law enforcement and friends?_ **

What indeed.

They arrange to speak in the morning tomorrow - the early morning hours for Will, and later in the afternoon for Nigel, who is clearly a night owl. It’s a very brief exchange all things considered - barely more than scheduling a meeting at the office, complete with a calendar invite when it comes down to it. 

It’s not that important, Will tries to remind himself. Everybody has a way out of this. No one’s getting married at 6:30 in the morning, and it’s unlikely anyone will ever find out he did this if he changes his mind, or Nigel thinks he’s a massive weirdo, or his brain catches up with the fact that he is seriously considering marrying someone to stick it to Hannibal. 

Just a call. 

\---

At 2:00 am, four and a half hours before he is supposed to be setting him computer up for a teleconference with his bi-curious if not resolutely bisexual marriage prospect, Will can’t sleep. It’s not his first rodeo with anxiousness, so he instead opts to rinse himself off in the shower and let the steam make him tired. This part works, but eventually he has to step out to the vision of himself in the mirror of the modest hall bathroom, which isn’t doing Will any favors. 

There’s a progression of the decay in the silver backing from steam building and drying on the edges of the glass. Will blames the uncountable number of showers ( _therapeutic or otherwise_ ) that have been taken in this space since Will took possession of the house, never mind the years prior. During the early days of the encephalitis, he had enough presence of mind to want to chase off the chill in his bones. Showers seemed safe, a practical answer to something the aspirin and the towels on the bed couldn’t handle. 

( _Wear more clothes if you’re cold,” says his father when he’s younger, but you weren’t able to keep enough of them dry and clean to get to the point of that helping, fevers shaking the water from you as surely as a dog trembles away from harmful hands._ ) 

Now, he is left with a speckle of black voids in an already old pane of mirror glass, held affixed to the wall by little clear brackets in the shape of board-straight hands that have held it firmly since its installation in the 30s or 40s. The edges of the black voids buckle, like the silver is consuming itself. Parts of his face disappear into them, reverse stars pulling the image of himself into them.

Objectively, Will sees a thinner version of himself. Prison isn’t great for your diet, and if he never sees a reconstituted Salisbury steak again in his life, then all the better. The milk tasted of waxed cartons, the vegetables of the same vaguely “green” flavor of salt. He’s subsisted on snack foods and water and canned soups now that he’s home, but he’s not often hungry. ( _You can’t shake the taste of scrambled eggs and sausage, fine bits of bell pepper, and paprika, and Cassie Boyle who was just young and stupid, not knowing she was in a field with a hungry animal. You know what’s out in the tall grass now. You know now not to trust the food’s plating or name._ )

Will doesn’t really know if he’s “cute” as much as he’s half-feral and probably more akin to Winston or Davy Crockett than some male avatar of aesthetic beauty, so maybe this will be a very short call after all. He’s never worried about this before, but looking at himself from the drying spaces between the steam and the pits in the glass, he’s never really had to assess if he was attractive to the entire spectrum of people, straight or otherwise. 

His facial hair has gone a bit wilder, so he makes a note to maybe straighten that out before the call with the clippers. He’s gone pale in the early hours without sleep, but that was always him no matter where or when he exists so there’s no fixing that. He has a thin mouth that is quick to frown and that’s permanent too, and wide ears that he’s grateful his curly hair has disguised since a girl in Fourth Grade saw fit to inform him. Will’s not sure if he can swing someone from one side of the Kinsey scale to the other, but it’s what he’s got. 

He’s choosing not to think about how just having a resemblance to Hannibal was enough for Nigel, a random dude in the Balkan peninsula with a cheeky smile and probably a hitherto unseen drug addiction or mafia connection, seen for all of 10 minutes on a truly questionable website, to neatly help him slide from firmly one end into the middle ground. It seems the memory of positive attention from a man he used to trust more than himself is enough to imprint the idea on anyone else that could be his twin, and that’s humiliating.

Will would guess Hannibal would laugh at that, but Will’s realized by now that despite his own touted skills and permeable edges, he doesn’t know Hannibal all that well. 

\---

When the clock hits 6:15 am, Will has not slept, doubling down on the tired eyes and pale face, but he’s been told that honesty is important in a marriage, and this is distinctly a default setting for Will Graham. If someone can’t wake up to this face, they can’t wake up without being disappointed from altar to grave as far as Will is concerned. 

Other than ensuring he is at peak exhaustion, Will has used his time productively. He has reorganized the kitchen drawers, done laundry, and cleared his college email inbox and spam folder of more than six months of unanswered inquiries. ( _Cleared is really the correct term - you sweepingly delete everything with reckless abandon. If anything’s important, they can ask again._ ) Only the appointment reminder and his brief emails back and forth with Nigel are left, looking ominous nestled against each other. He has managed to trim the edges of his beard and sideburns so he looks a bit less like he’s recently been released from prison to return to the woods - even if that’s true, it’s not really the impression he wants to lead with. Better to stick with the chronic insomnia. 

He has avoided drinking. The whole cursed enterprise of looking for a spouse through a gas station publication started on that foot, but the followthrough seems like it merits sobriety. Will reserves his thoughts about that for the after - there’s nothing saying he can’t make up for lost time once the call is done if it’s awful. 

At 6:20 am, Will releases the dogs to run outside before the sun comes up, prancing at the edges of the house in the snow while Will watches from the porch with bad coffee in hand, mostly to warm his hands with. His stomach is doing somersaults. He is ignoring his laptop. 

At 6:27, after Will is done wiping paws clean and ensuring everyone is settled in their beds, he slides to the kitchen table, where his screen is bright. From the corner of the chat application, he looks a little manic and young. He taps his fingers on the table. He tries not to think if he’s already halfway to 6:28, or if it’s only just started, because the difference of 30 seconds feels monumental. 

He should have written bullet points, or provided a resume, or taken a photo from an office party with his face in it and just sent it along. It’s not like the look of him halfway through writing his dissertation is that different from three months in a mental institution - Nigel would have gotten the gist. Video is so revealing and awkward and Will never knows if he’s supposed to look directly into the camera to make eye contact, or if he’s supposed to look at the other people on the screen to read their reactions. Everyone is making missed connections - the emotion slides off your face to hide behind watchful blank stares.

At 6:29, Will thinks he might just start laughing and walk off, but then it’s 6:30, and the call notification is ringing in the corner, and he answers because that’s what he asked for, and a person on the literal other side of the globe entertained his request, and that merits some kind of politeness and human decency. 

So when the video chat goes live, Will just sort of breathes, and finds a part of him wanting to smile. Not because it’s expected, but because it’s a relief for the decision to have been made, and action to take over hesitation. When he clicks "Answer" there's nothing left to do except do. And there he is, the mysterious Nigel, smiling out from the screen with a face that he once thought for certain was unmistakably unique to Hannibal Lecter. 

“Well,” he hears come over the speakers in smoky good humor, like there’s a laugh hiding in there, “hello there, gorgeous.” 

\---

Will makes several observations in short order in silence. He doesn’t feel particularly guilty about the stretch of quiet between them, because Nigel appears to be doing the same, eyes chasing from corner to corner and never quite making the effort to hold the camera’s gaze. 

( _You feel held by it, like each sweep of Nigel’s eyes is a hand, considering your chin, or the point of your cheekbones, or the wideness of your eyes, or if you can see the sweep of freckles and eyelashes beneath. It’s a heavy pass each time, broad strokes being painted by a person who’s had less to see of the other side of the conversation than you, had to hold out on your continued interest, had to work past their own hesitations at your glaring legal track record and wait for you to pass yours too. He's still here, so that means something, right?_ )

Firstly, Will sees there are differences after all. They’re small, things you’d only see if you were looking for them. More blonde in his hair than Hannibal’s, grown longer and fringy, casual, welcome to being combed back by his own fingers out of habit. Deeper crow’s feet from squinting or smiling, broadcasting emotion without hesitation. A notch in his nose from an injury. Hannibal wears his looks as a mask - Nigel wears his like he means to give it proper wear and tear, make it comfortable for himself to slide into each day.

Will thinks it’s this that makes him smile, really, because his second observation is that he knows what Nigel’s feeling, and the novelty of it is startlingly intimate with that mouth and those eyes who's he's more familiar with not understanding.

“Do I pass muster?” he finds himself asking. “Thank you, by the way. I know it’s not been a lot of time since...I guess Tuesday?” 

Nigel rolls his shoulder and leans forward on an arm, presumably resting against a table of his own. “If you’re not going to send a picture, might as well get on with it then, yeah? I’d rather you not fuck around than to pussyfoot about your best angle for several weeks. Never heard of a selfie before, Will?”

“Couldn’t decide if I have a best angle or not,” Will replies, eyes going from camera to screen, camera to screen. “Figured it’s better to just show all of them and let you make an assessment. Morning isn’t my best time either, but 10 hour time differences don’t really provide a lot of leeway.” 

“Well, is this a good morning?” asks Nigel. His accent is different, but the timbre is the same. Lighter in theme, the same way his face is more expressive. “You look as if you’ve slept in an alley after an all-nighter and a long line of something white.” 

“Good thing, too, since I hear that’s what you’re into,” he retorts. 

That gets another laugh with teeth, which Will is fascinated to see are crooked too. ( _One point to genealogical similarities, one point to what is probably East Bloc dentistry - you’re not quite willing to concede how strong the resemblance is. You feel shallow thinking about it with him directly in front of you._ ) There’s a pause, and Will watches as Nigel looks around the screen of his own computer, presumably looking at him again. Will’s amused to see him biting a lip, pointed incisor pressing a furrow into his mouth. 

“How old are you, Will?” he asks.

Will shrugs. “Younger than you.” 

“They say love is blind, but I guess in this case that’s not really necessary. You’re a good looking man, Will,” Nigel says, leaning back in his chair, going a little dimmer on the computer screen. There’s the glow of a cigarette in a dish somewhere off to his left - so a dedicated habit, not just a choice for the profile. “A little rough around the edges, but hardly such a mess to not be able to pick someone up in a bar. You’ve got a soft face behind all that scraggly beard. Don’t even look like much of a cocksucker to me. Why are you shopping for a husband?” 

“Curiosity at first.” 

“And now?” 

“Why are you offering yourself as one?” Will replies, dodging. 

Nigel laughs a little, looking off to the side and back again, the high contrast of the camera making him angular in the dark. It hurts Will a little bit to see it, something familiar except for the easy humor. “Marriage, as it turns out, is fucking hard. Just got out of one recently - I don’t recommend musicians, by the way, if you happen to keep shopping.”

No artist’s temperaments, the profile had said. ( _You feel much the same these days - you can’t stay ahead of Hannibal’s caprice and vision without becoming capricious yourself, and you feel exhausted at the thought._ )

“Well that’s a glowing endorsement,” Will says with a small smile of his own. “Somebody playing out of tune with you, Nigel?” 

Nigel scowls to that. “Out of tune,” he snorts. “More like playing an entirely different program. I’ve got to be straight with you, Will,” Nigel continues, sitting back up. 

“Doesn’t the entire premise of this kind of fall apart if you are?” Will finds himself saying without really thinking about it. He winces, but on the computer screen, Nigel gives a loud laugh this time, pulling the cigarette back to his face to smile between long drags taken at the side of his mouth that lifts higher to the left than the right. 

With his head tilted, Nigel gives another smile that’s wide, broad and warm. Will likes seeing it. “Shit...yes,” he huffs, “I guess you’re right. Then to give it to you crooked,” and he lifts his eyebrows scandalously at this, “I’m disappointed with what I’ve experienced. Makes a man jaded, running around with his heart on his sleeve to just be left behind when things get difficult. I am a _difficult_ man,” He concedes with a shrug, and takes a more elegant drag of his cigarette than Will would have thought he’d do. “But an honest one. I want a clean start, and fucking Coca-Cola’s been trying to sell me on the American Dream since I was a kid, so this” and he gestures at the computer, “seemed as viable as the next thing.”

“My only request,” he continues, hand held next to his head, smoke curling from the cigarette butt, “is that someone want me, not a fantasy of what I should be. I don’t go into anything by half measures - everything on the table from the start. It’s all or nothing. You either are here looking for a husband and intend to give as good as you get, or you go back to your dogs. You’re interested in giving this a proper go, or we both hang up on each other and stare at random people on the internet to wash this conversation down like a bad drink.” 

“So I ask again,” Nigel adds, looking directly into the camera, not the screen, where Will can feel his face flush red at the sightless scrutiny, “why are you here, Will?”

Will thinks about that. He’s thought about it a lot really, in the time that’s passed that he’s bothered to account for, but it’s the first time someone’s gone to the trouble of being straightforward about their intentions. It’s refreshing.

( _Why_ **_are_ ** _you here? Are you really going to legally bind and pay for someone who’s trying to be serious to live with you as a jab at Hannibal? Just because you saw a magazine? Do you think you’re above this, like paying money to make a call didn’t humble you the way posting a picture and a profile humbled him?_ ) 

It’s 7 in the morning, and Will’s feet are cold under the kitchen table, and the coffee is lukewarm, and it’s barely light out and he is calling a man more than 4,000 miles away. It has been four days now since he was released from the prison-hospital-nightmare that has been his life for a quarter of a year now. He’s not sure he has a job. His friends that he thought he loved are fucking each other, the best exclusionary measure he’s ever personally experienced, so he doesn’t really have friends. The friend that authentically seemed to support him is in multiple segments, somewhere in a cold case waiting for a piece of forensic evidence to be pulled from her that doesn’t exist. He has a few texts from Jack he supposes, but he is ignoring them, because Jack wants a re-do on his reputation, not Will’s. He thought he killed a girl. He thought he killed a few.

Despite all this, and being tired, and not being sure what he’s doing with his life, having this call feels nice.

It feels nice because he hasn’t had to lie, or talk about death, or talk about how he’s unfulfilled because he isn’t happily murdering his way across the countryside. Nobody mentions prison, or how he’s weird outside of the reasonable weirdness of the circumstances. Nobody is sick from anything other than the general circumstances of single life after 30. It’s awkward - that’s ok, Will’s never had a moment to explain himself and his motivations that wasn’t, but Nigel is awkward about it too, and that makes it easier to smile about, mutually self-deprecating themselves across massive time zone differences.

( _You’re unfulfilled when you are by yourself, and right now you aren’t. So that’s kind of an answer, isn’t it? So be honest, Will._ )

“I’m lonely,” Will says with a grimace, half his mouth hooking upwards at the confession. “I came home at the beginning of the week, and realized I didn’t have anyone. Circumstances are such that I can’t just...meet people and expect anything good to come from it, and…” This part sticks a bit, more vulnerable than he’d like. He tries not to look at his own face, sitting pale in the corner of the video call screen. He knows what it looks like. 

But Nigel is watching, seemingly earnest in the static of the partial dark of his home, wherever it is in Bucharest, making his face dance in digital noise. The glow is golden from evening where he is, cutting across his face in muted color, probably no warmer than Virginia is in the winter. Maybe there’s snow there too. Will bets he would tell him if there was. He almost asks.

Instead, he finds his voice. “You made the most sense in a lineup of people because you reminded me of someone that I thought I wanted that...wasn’t ever honest.” Understatement of the year. “I know you’re not the same person, and that’s shallow, but there it is,” he adds, and finds himself looking at the keyboard, where his hands rest, ready to close out the program. Surely he’ll be offended. This is, after all, the only time they’ve met - there’s not a lot of room for forgiveness in first impressions. 

Nigel seems to think on that for a minute, pulling the cigarette to his face, looking out occasionally at the sunset on his side of the world. But he doesn’t hang up - he smiles again, something soft and fond. 

“There’s the kind of answer I can trust,” he says, still looking into the lens of his camera, instead of the image of Will. Will’s eyes cut down to the look, aggressive on anyone else, but stalwart now where only he can see it. “Was that so hard?” 

“Incredibly,” Will replies as flippant as he can, grateful for the distraction of Buster who has come to sit at his feet and beg for more breakfast, little snout on his knee. “So, be honest with _me_ ,” he continues, “is the cocaine like your number one priority before the honesty, or was that just to scare off all the old fucks?” 

“Young fucks only, Will. You’ve got to live while you can,” Nigel says with a grin, a secret for him to keep. “Fortunately for me, it seems to not be a problem here.” 

And that sounds nice - living while he can, no problems, someone that will give him a straightforward story. He could live without the ambiguity around the hard drugs, but Will guesses hard drugs are probably a step up from gaslighting and literal cannibalism in the hierarchy of sins. 

They shoot the shit for awhile - Will talks about his career in forensics, and Nigel talks about his apartment in Bucharest and asks what it’s like in Wolf Trap, and if Will keeps prissy dogs or are they proper ones that like to scrap and play. ( _A combination, I think,” you reply, running the top of a foot over Max who lays his bulk at the bottom of your chair, insecure that you’ll leave and insecure that you’ve stayed._ ) Nigel doesn’t have family. Will doesn’t really either. Their circumstances are different, but in some ways they’re the same.

“Think it over,” Nigel says before they go. “You won’t be able to get rid of me once you commit, so be fucking sure you want another dog for your pack first.”

“Even numbers are better than odd,” Will says absently, and feels a quiet resolve when the screen closes to black, and he’s left staring at the two lonely emails in the inbox again. 

The call lasts 43 minutes, 7:13 am shining out from the microwave display. He is ready for a nap, or coffee that’s not cold, or for someone to strike him upside the head so he can just relax for a minute and rest. Will doesn’t think to record the call. Even without his photographic memory, he knows how Nigel looks. 

( _It’s Hannibal’s face, but it’s a handsome one, worn by someone else who sounds like someone else, and you can’t really ask for more than that._ ) 

  
  



	3. a much needed promise via computer

_“It’s all or nothing,”_ Nigel had said. _“You either are here looking for a husband and intend to give as good as you get, or you go back to your dogs,”_ he demanded. 

Will lets it repeat in his head in the hours following their call, and into Saturday. It chases him up and down the halls of the house, and through the fields where he walks with his dogs, flinging up snow with boots and padded feet alike in the chilly winter air. He brushes fur, wipes matted tears from the corners of dark brown eyes, and rubs paws on the deck between fleecy towels until they are warm and ready to come inside. Dogs are like children in this regard- they don't know when to quit, or how not to make messes.

Will loves them. He’s not sure they are enough if that’s what he’s left with, but that’s his clearest option if he doesn’t follow through on whatever...this is. 

He has to let that sit under his tongue to dissolve. It’s a strange flavor - this brand of honesty, both a command and advice, taken from a complete stranger. He supposes it was well-suited to being found carded between his potato chips and cheap whiskey on the car ride home, made of the same kind of simple things that are bad for him, but what he occasionally craves. Getting a husband from overseas because he’s lonely is a bit more of a commitment than gas station food though. He’s sure healthy people are supposed to adopt dogs after relationships fall apart, not people, but he already has seven, and the gap still isn’t filled. 

( _It’s all or nothing, comes the refrain._ )

He cleans the kitchen, and replaces the water tap's seal at the sink - it has been knocked loose by the investigative team looking for more than Abigail’s ear. He has been avoiding it, eating from paper plates as not to wash them and the occasional fast food bag. Will has thought about returning to the gas station to see if there are more magazines while on a dinner run, maybe with different life-altering decisions advertised through glossy pages and somewhat lurid websites, but the current one is still buzzing between his ears. 

He tightens and oils the hinges and locks on the front door and storm door - they are a bit loose from the number of people coming in and out without his permission. He didn’t get to stay to see, already cuffed and pushed into the back seat of a police cruiser with Jack looking grim from the side of the car door, but he hopes someone corralled the dogs and didn’t leave them to mill inside and outside of the house, between the CSI agents, the photographer, and Hannibal, talking apologetically to the first sheriff on the scene to find the two of them. Will’s feet had been black with mud. Will snorts at the image of the other man taking delicate care to smudge it there, a decorative touch to an already shit morning. He chooses not to think further on the esophageal tube, of having the watery tears of someone dreadfully sick wiped from his face, but he’ll likely never forgive or forget it.

Will wonders how many times on long flights between crime scenes that Hannibal has invited himself in, made friends with his dogs with questing, curious hands, spreading his awareness of Will through his fly-fishing gear, his serviceable but old cooking utensils, his chest of drawers with nothing more exciting than spare clothes. Will keeps a couple of old photos here of his parents too, going soft and muted in the sleeve of a Kodak film packet - he doesn’t open it very often, because he doesn’t know those people on the paper, not really, a relationship born and dead before he’s learned to talk. He’s certain Hannibal would have opened it and helped himself, as he seems the type to be. It’s not something Will’s open to discussing, with therapists, would-be friends, or husbands for that matter, so Hannibal would likely never mention it, indexing it for his personal curiosity, but Will feels that intrusion the way he can feel quick pressure on a bruise. 

The photos he moves to the hall closet, behind the cardboard box full of gloves and winter hats, buried in the paper detritus of his college transcripts and copies of his thesis. He knows where they’ll be, when he can work around the idea of someone having looked at them without asking. Nigel doesn’t seem the type, unlike Hannibal, but it’s better to remove the temptation, or so he hears. Will swallows around that thought, and rearranges the drawers to his chest to make space. Piles of white shirts and socks at his side in bland stacks give way to the maple wood grain of the furniture. The empty left hand side of each feels full of purpose, ready. 

( _You either are here looking for a husband and intend to give as good as you get, or you go back to your dogs._ )

Will sits on that image too when going to bed that night, and the gilt edge of grey-ash-blonde hair taking in a sunset from the other side of the world, and what the person behind it would choose to fill the space with, if it’s as warm as his hair and his direct, uncomplicated words. 

He can’t sleep out of the sensation that it’s daytime when he thinks too long on it, and there’s shining ice and snow on the red and slate-blue roofs of Bucharest. Winter sun is neither warm nor burning, but smudges the edges of buildings, walls, the cobbled streets from the apartment window he only saw a corner of. He extends his impression of it to what he thinks Nigel sees, going between the computer screen where a wane, serious-eyed Will is staring into the lens of a machine praying for connection, and the view beyond. 

He doesn’t know what it is - maybe a side-street full of shops and restaurants, maybe an alley full of electric wires, and pipes, and the backsides of old townhomes and flats above convenience stores and boutique offices. Maybe it’s beautiful, and maybe it’s ugly but familiar. All Will knows is the window faces west, and Nigel’s eye is white-gold in the feed that comes back through the lens to Will in Wolf Trap, and he’d like to ask what other warm things Nigel surrounds himself in, what makes him feel at home. 

\--- 

  
  


Will gives it until Sunday, which is to say he boots up the computer at 3 am on Sunday morning in a sleep-deprived delirium, and opens his email to apologize and say that it’s all been a terrible idea, sorry to waste anyone’s time, but also, can Nigel oblige him by sending him a picture of the space outside his home so that Will can put that obsession to rest and go back to bed.

**_Hi_ ** , he would say. **_I’ve done some thinking and have concluded this has been a horrifyingly self-reflective almost 48 hours since we last spoke, and the verdict is I’m a mess and you should wait for another prospect. Flying from Romania to rural Virginia to live with and potentially (if all goes well) cohabitate and fornicate with a man who professionally considers how best to kill people seems kind of a concerning variant of “all or nothing”. Have you considered counseling first? I hear it works for people that aren’t me. I am terrified neither of us has thought this through, and we are about to commit to something that started from me buying a magazine that was next to distinctly non-FDA approved sexual performance aides._ **

Instead, he creates a new draft, and writes: 

**_Do you think you can be happy with me?_ **

Will stares at it, cursor blinking for more. 

And it’s so stark and untainted by obfustication and at its heart what Will always hopes will be _yes, yes, I see you and I like what I see underneath the bad grooming, the bad attitude, the bad timing of your truths and your sense of violence, and I like it all the same,_ that he leaves it, and hits send.

\---

Will’s certain Nigel will reply, because even if Will has to first build the cross to suffer on and only _then_ can he carry it, Nigel seems like he doesn’t waste time, or carry many crosses if he can help it. All in all, a healthy lifestyle probably, and something Will could afford to learn from his not-yet-maybe-never-husband. 

Like the picture of good, perfectly non-obsessive decision making he is, Will sits at his computer and reads news articles, waiting for a notification for a new email, and 3 am quickly passes into 4, into 5, into 6, until the coffee maker is running and the sun begins to blush the edges of the treeline. Maybe he can anticipate a nice “well fuck you and your emotional vulnerability”, or “thanks for the $1500 - this has all been an elaborate ploy for rent payments”, or better yet and more practically, “consider the website from which we met and re-read your question”.

( _That you’re unable to accept the possibility of a positive response is your failing, not his, but better to be prepared these days - the last time you got your hopes up, it was the worst thing that ever happened to you._ ) 

There’s not a lot on Miriam Lass just yet, or at least that’s not easily digestible in public news - just platitudes that she is recovering well, and they are following every possible lead, and are very thankful for her stalwart resolve as they pursue the Chesapeake Ripper case. If Will bothered to reply to any of the FBI requests to speak with Miriam, he suspects he’d have a better idea of what Hannibal might be planning. 

Hannibal, when he allows himself to think of him, is a sore point, beyond seeing him in Nigel’s face and apparently thinking it’s the kind of face he’d like to sleep near, and maybe make out with. ( _This in and of itself is a sore point - your sexuality, while never at the forefront of your mind had been a veritable straight iron rod, if a bit rusty and underutilized. The fact that you are now flirting with men in their 40s on video chats and seriously contemplating a rushed marriage is both unforeseen and bewildering._ ) The other man is clearly not done with whatever it is that he’s decided to perpetrate on Will and Jack’s investigation, lives, and psyche - that he gets to live rent free in their thoughts is probably the extra bacon on a very tasty burger. Miriam Lass has a part to play, even if Will hasn’t taken the time to watch it. 

It’s a curious thing, Hannibal’s silence. Alana he understands - angry but thoughtful Alana, wanting to give him room to accept the changes that have happened when he was in the basement of the mental hospital, accepting the smell of old wet stones, the metal tang of the cage bars, the way that everyone just...ignores him and the awkward puzzle he represents. But Hannibal, he’s never seen a knife that didn’t need a good twist, and his insistence that he was separating himself from Will following the attack by Matthew Brown feels less like actual hurt, and more like a planned retreat. 

Friday marked another appointment missed - the fourteenth in a long progression of missed appointments. He could have gone. He suspects the time remains open, like 7:30 pm is sacrosanct. Hannibal is bored with Will in prison, which is the only reason Will is currently not, and Hannibal expects Will to re-engage.

Instead, Will was awake at 6 in the morning to talk to his long-lost Soviet twin, or whatever the hell makes the universe coalesce into two of that same face, instead of mentally preparing for the evening’s gauntlet of questions. Will is honest with Nigel about his unhappiness, where with Hannibal he dances to disguise ugly truths. ( _You do not remember a time you could be truthful, not really in that sharp way that simply saying “I’m lonely” does._ ) He does not think about therapy, or the drive to Baltimore, or the glaring black of his gun that Will thinks could be good for putting a hole into someone’s head. He talks about home, and the dogs, and what life looks like away from the FBI, and Hannibal, and everything else that has made this fall and winter the kind that makes people write miserable novels about the English countryside and social iniquity. 

So he’s not re-engaging as much as getting engaged, assuming Nigel is as tenacious a motherfucker as Will thinks he might be. Maybe he won’t be put off by Will’s self-deprecation. It would be so good for someone to see past it, and just keep him the way he is. 

\---

At 9:46 am, Will doesn’t get an email - he gets a request to answer a video call. 

As a person thoroughly committed to avoiding answers he doesn’t like by utilizing oblique conversations, and only recently having discovered a person who cuts through that bullshit like he’s paid to, Will mentally somersaults away from the computer, where [ fridaysson@posta.ro ](mailto:fridaysson@posta.ru) is asking to connect. He reigns his aversion back in when he reminds himself he asked for this, and Nigel doesn’t deserve to have his time wasted any more than it is, and that he’s made the effort to call even if it’s Sunday evening in the Balkans, even if Will is by contrast sending needy one-liners on Sunday’s earliest hours in New England.

Will answers, because it’s the right thing to do. 

When the window opens, Nigel is sitting in the same position, window to his left sealed, where the night is hiding, and a view Will has already spent too much time contemplating for all the difference that it makes. The apartment is very dark, mostly just lit by the screen, throwing his brows and the creases of his face into stark contrast. If he wasn’t giving a half-smirk already, Will would think he’s angry. 

It also strikes him this is only the second time he’s seen him. 

“Cold feet, Will?” Nigel asks, all sing-song and amused. 

Will shrugs, knowing he looks like how he feels - tired, messy, not very well-kempt around the face where he at least made an effort before. “More like a midnight emotional crisis while thinking it over, per your request.” 

“What’s a little midnight emotional crisis between friends?” Nigel replies, in what Will thinks might include a wink. “Marriage is a serious thing that you’ve given two days of consideration by my terms. Fucking have a crisis, have questions, just be clear what you want to do about it when you’re done with it.” 

Will sighs with a smile of his own. ( _Look at you, Captain Discretion. Two whole days! Almost a whole week since you started this! You spent longer deciding where to spend a vacation three years ago._ ) He has no idea how the man on his screen can be so cavalier, when it’s put in that light. “Do you really not have any reservations about this? _You_ haven’t even asked if I have expectations for you. What if you’re dependent on me? What if I’m a psychopath and I get off on withholding or something?”

( _Well, you technically already know one of those kinds of people. Odds are slim you would be too, though Nigel doesn’t know that._ ) 

“Maybe _I_ get off on withholding,” Nigel shrugs with a grin, and lights a cigarette from an ashtray next to him. It’s a familiar sight - saving stubs, finishing them off when you feel like it. Will gets the itch in his fingers to do the same, not having smoked since he lived in New Orleans. “I don’t, by the way. Very hands-on. If we’re taking notes. Also, my favorite color is red, I don’t eat tripe, and my first pet’s name was Dulceata.” 

Will blinks, absorbing that. “I guess we did skip the basics and go straight to the meat of the issue.” 

Nigel smiles. “You’ve got to take your heart in your teeth for this kind of thing.”

“Is yours?” asks Will, swallowing. “In your teeth?” 

“I like to give it a good chewing,” comes the cheeky reply. “Make sure I’ve got a good grip on it before running forward. No time or interest in screwing around.” 

“Sounds less like a heart and more like a grenade,” says Will, leaning into a hand staring into the screen. 

“Hope you’re ready to catch it,” Nigel shrugs and shakes out his shoulders like it speaks for itself. Will thinks that tracks - there’s very little so far about Nigel that doesn’t have at least a little potential for disaster and shrapnel, and Will worried that he’s going to fumble the pitch with his own problems, nevermind Nigel’s. ( _Consider the face and the other person who shares it. Have you really considered that part of this story, or are you sticking to the idea that you’re only tired of being by yourself?_ ) 

“What’s outside the window?” asks Will, because he can’t help himself, and he's still thinking of it, even as Nigel is working him through this. 

Nigel’s brows raise and pull together, before he laughs. “The backside of another building, sweetheart. You think I can see the Alps from here or something? I get the power boxes and the back streets like all the other sorry bastards,” he says with a huff, before standing from his seat to look down past the panes of glass. “That ugly brown Skoda is in my spot again,” he adds with a scowl, chain smoking the whole time, open as a book. 

Will watches a smooth lock of hair shift on his neck from thousands of miles away, and makes his decision. 

“Are we doing this?” he says, a little wide eyed, heartbeat a hum in his throat. 

Nigel sits back down, arm slung over the backside of it, flicking ash in little absent movements. “How long do you usually keep your dogs, Will? Ever give one away?” 

Will frowns. “What kind of question is that? I keep them as long as they live.” 

But Will understands as soon as Nigel nods, putting out the cigarette with neat little turns until the few curls of smoke Will can make out in the dark dissipate. He looks not relieved, but resolved. 

“If you can do for me what you do for them, then fuck yes, we’re doing this,” Nigel replies, “and we’ll figure out the rest as we go. Spirit of adventure, or some shit.” 

Will’s nerves settle almost instantly. Lifetime decision, made in a fifteen minute call. He laughs, and looks away, and back again to Nigel looking into the camera again, unavoidable through the fiber and currents that connect them across the Atlantic. “Well I guess welcome to the pack, then.” 

\---

It takes another week for everything to come together into a plan. Will isn’t given the opportunity to really reverse his decision, because once the decision is made, like clockwork, Nigel calls him every morning at 7:00 am and Will answers, because he is a morning person, and Nigel isn’t, and hopefully they can come to some sort of compromise on that because feeding seven dogs at 7 in the morning isn’t the kind of quiet activity that you get to sleep through. 

Point being, they don’t really know each other but it didn’t stop Will from asking in the most non-committal, man to man, totally unromantic way if Nigel still wants to marry him. In turn, Nigel isn’t going to be stopped by a week of inaction, and drops information bombs like each will entice Will to listen longer, and forget his rapidly cooling coffee day after day. His earnestness is contagious, and while the calls can be awkward if either is distracted by their surroundings, the importance of each is understated but thrumming between them each time. 

Things that Will learns about Nigel in short order: 

He speaks some French in addition to his English and Romanian - it is apparently the cosmopolitan thing to do, a tradition dating back before World War II in the country. When asked if he speaks any Russian, he snorts and says “nobody speaks that if they had a choice.” Will files that away with his other sensitive topics as **_Soviet Bloc Assumptions and Erasing My Cultural Identity_ ** , alongside **_Ugly Divorce_ ** , **_Questionably Drug Running_ ** , and **_Are You Actually Into Men, I Can’t Always Tell But Thanks for the Consistent Compliments_ **. 

( _These are all things you’ll have to tread over someday - you have your own catalogue of miseries, including_ **_I’m Afraid of Affection Being Polite Not Loving_ ** _,_ **_I Thought I Killed and Ate Someone_ ** _, and_ **_My Psychiatrist Got Too Close To Me, and He Will Hate Me Forever When He Meets You, and I Think I Want That, But Sometimes I Don’t_ ** _. You haven’t quite decided how you feel about those, so you concede it’s fair he has some stories he’s not ready to tell either._ )

Nigel has family - an elderly mother in his hometown that he doesn’t speak with. Not the way that Will doesn’t speak to his own father, a choice made out of mutual awkwardness, but that Nigel’s mother is apparently “a judgmental cunt” who still insists he visit for the occasional holiday. When Will offers to arrange ways for that to happen, Nigel just waves his hand dismissively. 

Nigel has determined ahead of time that he wants to like Jack, the German Shepherd mix with the white and cognac orange piebald coat, the best out of all the dogs when Will gives him a visual introduction to each. This is determined by the merit of Jack wagging his tail where the others merely turn their heads at Will, holding the laptop in front of him like it’s a toy. Will thinks he’ll like Buster best, but most people do - everyone likes a dog that will give chase. (“ _Enthusiasm is always good in my book,” he says with a smile, and teases the dogs in different Romanian phrases that get him more reactions. You tamp down the image of someone loving your dogs the way that you love them - it stings your eyes to consider the opportunity for it, or the loss of it, and it’s all too new to put stock in it_.) 

Nigel doesn’t drink much - what little he does is generally very sweet or beer, because cigarettes since he was a teenager have wrecked his palate, and the good whiskey tastes about the same as the bad to him, though he will occasionally drink a plum brandy as an aperitif. He has no intention of stopping the cigarettes - he doesn’t care if he has to walk a kilometer down the street to indulge and then shower first to get back in the house, and Will makes it a point to not say that there’s a good chance he’ll start smoking again if he doesn’t impose something like that as a rule.

Nigel will definitely be trouble - he’s good at trying to rephrase things euphemistically about his day to day life, that he works in a club, that he has very few friends and lots of business partners, but Will is an ex-police officer, a criminal profiler, and one of the best judges of character that he knows. ( _Hannibal, you note, is the first true fuck-up of a long career in knowing what you’re about, and the orientation of others around you to your gravity._ ) Nigel doesn’t seem very bothered by Will’s own history, outside of maybe trying to avoid his own as some kind of turn-off, but he’s very brazen about not letting things get in his way, and understanding that his life is not an easy one - just a loyal one.

Will takes this to mean he is also very likely violent underneath all that good humor. 

This doesn’t trouble Will, even if it should.

( _It’s a relief, really - if he can be violent, he can understand that you can be violent too. You wonder if you could be more violent than him or even Hannibal, given the right upbringing, given the right circumstances to exist in. You are elementally made of hateful things and ways to understand them. You are simply waiting to be put under pressure, and transformed by that_.) 

\---

The people with **_SecretOperation.Ro/mance_ ** don’t really get less obnoxious, even when they’re receiving yet another generous sum of money. Will minds himself and refers to them by their appropriate legal title, and only goes quiet with outrage once when he hears the fee schedule associated with each separate document that they have to put together to give Nigel the free and clear to come over for a green card. Seeing as Will is the one filling out most of the details, it seems like a disproportionate distribution of labor, but he guesses it beats arguing with the Immigration office himself. After all, they did get things done within a week.

“Congratulations, Mr. Graham. Your fiance, Mr. Nigel Paraschiv has been granted a K-1 visa, which will allow you 90 days from the issue date to complete a common law marriage in the state of your residence. He will qualify for a Permanent Residence Card once that is filed within the county of your residence.”

Just hearing that is bizarre.

“You will still be responsible for providing the flights and any associated overnight stays before arriving in the States. You will also be responsible for finding an independent marriage celebrant in Fairfax County,” she adds, sounding a little confused. “No Justice of the Peace marriages in your area, so you’ll have to find someone to conduct the ceremony once you have your license.”

And there’s the unavoidable local governance kink in the cogs he has come to expect. 

Will sighs - he supposes it’s been too easy up to this point anyway, just expensive. He hasn’t had to consider a single thing other than if he’s making a massive mistake, and whether or not he’s even safe for people, or if Nigel is safe for people, or if this is the most extreme version of a mid-life crisis that he thought he’d ever have. 

So three months to solve the issue of the formal ceremony. Will mentally adds that to his tally of those things that they’ll figure out as they go. 

He buys rings anyway, because that’s what you do, and that’s what’s expected and what people ask about. “Oh, congratulations!” they say, a platitude between casual co-workers, “so happy for you!” while their eyes track hands for the truth of it, looking for something glittering or you’re a liar, as though a ring indicates validity, or attachment, or honesty. 

( _If you’re going all in on this thing that started as a binge drinking compulsion, you might as well cover all the bases. Get a registry going, carry the poor idiot that conceded to spend their life with you over the threshold. Pick pet names. Call your dad and get the argument about your goddamn same-sex marriage over with before Nigel has to be subjected to it. Maybe send announcements to the whole twenty people you see somewhat regularly with individual notes. Hannibal’s you mentally leave blank. The act of sending it alone is message enough. Polite, even. You’d pay to see his face when he reads it._ )

Two broad plain gold bands, one a men’s average American size 10 because he can’t quite bring himself to ask if Nigel cares, or if Nigel even wants this. The other is a slender size 8 - he’s always had delicate looking fingers ( _with a deceptively strong grip_ ). 

He can always sell it if they change their minds. What’s the worst that can happen, that he be embarrassed for all of two minutes? Will’s had worse. He’s had worse not even that long ago.

\---

For all that Will is a literal 1950’s Jello salad of neuroses, complete with strange fruit and nut pairings, Will doesn’t actually experience anxiety in the traditional, withdrawing way. Twitchy yes, but not fearful or retiring. This has been largely a good thing - he doesn’t really want to consider what his mental state would be like between the encephalitis, imprisonment, and various serial killers if it hadn’t been. 

He is not inclined to panic, and he generally trends more towards existential dread than fear of imminent bodily peril. He’s not afraid to engage with people - he just doesn’t want to if he can help it. He’s perfectly comfortable breaking his own thumbs to get out of handcuffs, and generally has few hesitations once he’s committed to something. While he can’t really run away from his mind which is always thinking of new ways for things to be worse, Will feels he’s generally pretty even keeled for a person with such horrendous luck with how his empathy works. 

( _Anyone who says you’re paranoid hasn’t been paying attention - an actual tactically brilliant madman has been out to get you since the two of you were introduced, and normal people generally don’t like you, so you're not working with a full toolbox here._ ) 

That being said, standing in the international baggage claim area of the Dulles International Airport, Will is pretty sure he’s going to throw up on his only decent pair of shoes, which are sable brown and a little damp with snowmelt and mud against the drab khaki of his trousers, because spending two weeks on what essentially amounted to reading a few reviews on a product and speaking with a salesman who is also the product in question, and then committing to _marrying it_ is probably certifiably manic. Sure, it takes another week from there to arrange flights and let Nigel settle his business in Bucharest, but that’s still almost nothing. Will’s a little shocked when Nigel tells him that’s all the time he needs - he must have been severing ties even as Will was just starting to get to know him. 

So if he’s breathing a little shallow and fast, flexing his fists in the pockets of his new herringbone coat, Will thinks that’s probably the appropriate response to an inappropriate decision making process. 

Will considered bringing a dog with him and just sitting out in the car until the appointed time of the flights arrival from Paris. Maybe Buster, who’s less of a driving companion and more of an element of chaos jumping between the front and back seat, but a good anchor when Will needs somewhere to trap his hands, petting the soft ears and smoothing greying hairs around the terrier’s eyes and snout. It’s snowing and grey, cold again after a few days of sunshine, so it’s too cold for a dog in the car. Will sincerely wishes he had better weather and better company to welcome his would-be husband to, but what else is new this year? 

He instead arrives an hour too early and fidgets on a bench, side-eying people who attempt to take the vacant space near him. 

There’s something comforting about being in a space that nobody knows him - he’s never really minded the business travel for the FBI and lecture series. He can lean back and listen in to other people’s small worries - that family thinks they might miss their connecting flight, this one is meeting a son that’s been at college for several months, a wife meets with her spouse coming back from Tokyo after months of service overseas. The windows are wide and filled with the tarmac-paved spaces of the runway, planes ambling between them, a runway full of people and machines hurrying other people to their next phase. 

It’s not as nice a view from here in the baggage claim, though the wide overhead windows that glow with winter clouded sun feel restful, falling flakes tapping against them to melt and slide away. So he watches those, and the lights of planes leaving above, and let’s himself just listen to the shuffle of suitcases and shoes on the polished floor until he’s disturbed. 

“Will?”

Will looks up, throat stuck to the top of his mouth, fingers twisting against each other still in his coat pockets. He blinks the glaze from his eyes, and takes in a nondescript duffel on the floor next to tar-black shoes and trousers. When he looks up, of course it’s Nigel - it’s who he’s here for, though he didn’t expect to be struck so hard by it. 

The resemblance to Hannibal truly is striking, though Nigel is certainly less careful with his image - he’s a little ruffled from the flight, hair not in disarray as much as a little flat, but his neck tattoo rises up from the collar of his shirt and a simple blazer, belying the formality of the buttons closed all the way up to the top. ( _Wanting to make a good impression, wanting the first time to not be his worst, even if you yourself advertised the image of Will Graham as tired and waxy-white._ ) Their builds are similar, but Nigel carries himself with a sort of sideways swagger that speaks more to someone inclined to leaning or lounging, his angles softened where Hannibal’s are drawn into stark lines. 

Nigel smiles, and he’s another person, and the idea of the man an hour away that shares his face melts off with the snow on the windows. He is actually here. It is mid-afternoon in Virginia, the witching hours in Romania, and they are sharing the same kind of sunlight, which makes Nigel’s hair far greyer in person. Will wants to see it in the fullness of an evening glow. 

Will blinks again and finds a smile of his own. 

( _This is Nigel, who likes sweet wines, and unfiltered cigarettes, and flirts like you are some great beauty. This is a person who asked you why you wanted this, and you actually answered the way you should have, the way you often don’t._ )

“Well hello there, blue eyes,” Nigel huffs with a half-grin. “I daresay you’re better in the flesh than you are on the computer, which is really quite an accomplishment.” 

“You’re not so bad yourself,” Will says, hands bracing on his knees to stand. He’s not quite sure what the appropriate greeting is here - lovers kiss, but they’ve never so much as shook hands before. Family hugs, but they’re not married yet. 

As with most things, Nigel makes it easy - his hands are full until he drops the suitcase, other hand delicately keeping hold of what looks like...flowers. Burgundy red-black, five petals pointed, nodding their blossoms like heads at prayer. He brings them up with a shrug and the kind of crooked toothy grin that Will has found to be very mischievous over pixels and now in the flesh.

“They’re called Spânzul at home,” he explains. “Something different here, I’m sure. I would have found you a proper Romanian dog rose, but it’s cold as tits back in Bucharest and I was reliably informed they don’t bloom until April, so these will have to be your token souvenir from home.” 

Will finds one of those shocked, airless laughs coming from somewhere behind his mouth, cheeks hurting from the rapid twist of his lips. ( _Laughing always comes as a shock to you, especially if it’s earned and real._ ) 

“You carried those for the last, what...16 hours?” he asks. 

“Well I only need one hand for the bag,” Nigel says with that cheeky smile of his, teeth caught at his mouth’s edge. “I could have lived without the wet spots on my only good pants, but I hear from my lady friends that small gestures should generally come before the fucking big ones, and we’re in the business of one of those big ones here shortly, yeah?” 

His hands are hot around the flowers, putting them into Will’s where the stems and brown wax paper poke into his palms. The heavy dark red heads of the blooms turn their faces downwards, looking sleepy and soft with their golden stamens like starbursts at the center. Spânzul, he had said - hellebores, or Lenten roses, Will recognizes. His fingers hesitate to close around them, like they might wake up, heartbeats through their spidery pink veins the way that Will’s hum in his neck. They're a little limp, but he'd be astounded if after almost a solid day of travel that they didn't.

It’s a stupid gift, really, not appropriate for a man in his late 30s to receive from a man in his mid 40s that have never met in person. Certainly not worth Trans-Atlantic travel inconveniences. Any first gift was going to be weird, but this one feels intimate in a way that Will doesn’t really know how to parry. Nigel is stalwart in holding them where Will can properly grasp them, patient despite a sort of twitching anxiousness between them. 

( _Say something. Anything._ ) 

“Thank you,” he says quietly. “That’s a long way to go for a gesture. All or nothing, huh?”

“Heart in your teeth, Will,” Nigel replies with a grasping hand, before dropping it to reach for his duffel. 

“Wait,” Will says, fishing into his pocket. Nigel does, eyebrows up, though there’s a tension in his face that fails to hide that he’s not sure what happens next, bravado aside. The all black clothes and the all smiles face are a front - dress for the job you want, not the job you have, and he doesn’t entirely know what Will wants. 

The gold of the rings are warm from his pants pocket, where they have sat nestled in the folds of fabric, warmed by an ignored cellphone and the heat of his hip. They click together, metal chafing and squeaking under the pressure of his fingers. He offers the larger of the two. 

“I didn’t...know what size you wear. Or if you’d want one. Or if it mattered,” Will mutters. “But it’s yours, if you want it.” 

His hand sits there as awkward as the flowers in the other, but unlike Will, and unlike the person that stands seen but unpresent, who is more likely to watch than to act, Nigel nods. A broad palm comes up to catch the ring in it, turning it between his fingers. Will’s surprised to see tattoos here as well. ( _I’m the master of my fate, says one, and what a thing of envy that is in fine cursive script, woven in the soft spaces between the skin._ ) 

Nigel smiles, and slips it onto his left hand. No fanfare to it, just something he should wear, accepted without complaint. He struggles a bit getting it over the knuckle, the size perhaps a little too tight, but when Will goes to tell him they can have it resized if he’d like, Nigel’s already nested it against his hand. "It fits," he insists, over Will's protest. "Couldn't get it back over my knuckle if I wanted to, anyway." 

So it's going to be like that. Will nods after a moment, and slides his own on, feeling heavy, important. They go to the exit, to the parking lot, to the car, snowflakes catching between their hair and left to soak in. The air is cold, but he is very warm, mind casting out to the person at his right who's he's never truly seen, and thinking it doesn't seem to matter that much. 


	4. a compromise made through a bed

The drive home feels short. His little hellebores are wilting in the cup holder, anxious for water, and Will tries to not be obvious and empathize with them - struggling inanimate objects or not, he refuses to be told he can’t look at them and think “same.”

There’s nothing cute about it, like he and Nigel talk the whole way and become intimately acquainted and now everything will be completely peaceful from here on out. Immediate bosom friends, they are not - if anything, Will finds himself in the space of about ten minutes from the moment they pull out of the airport parking lot having to remind himself that Nigel is not Hannibal, and that it would probably be completely unreasonable to run the car off the road to pull some kind of overblown Thelma and Louise-esque ending. That would be unfair to Nigel, who has been perfectly pleasant in spite of Will’s occasional stretched silences, and who has also volunteered to live with someone that thinks that is a reasonable solution to interpersonal problems.

With that in mind, Nigel may have more screws loose than Will. 

The drive is short because there’s so much that Will thinks he’s supposed to explain between when the ignition is turned on to the moment that the lane leading out to his house appears that every street light and exit ramp is a second ticking down. 

_“You look like the literal spitting image of my psychiatrist!”_ is what he should be saying. _“I think it’s likely you’ll meet and he’s going to do something unfortunate!”_ This would be prudent. Nigel has a right to know, and while Will alluded to it in that first call, he hasn’t...exactly communicated to what extent the resemblance should be noted. Hannibal would likely find it flattering for about ten seconds before taking in the implications. From Nigel’s end of the scope, it’s a much less desirable concept. Second place. The new model, even if in another time, Will might have preferred the old one. 

( _Revisit that later. Revisit that when it’s not a sore to pick, and there’s a perfectly good bandaid to your right to cover it up and make it disappear._ ) 

The next thing he should be conveying is that he has no earthly idea what he’s doing, and at some point his sense of adventure will grind to a halt, and the second crisis of the last two weeks will begin anew, and that the only thing he can promise is that it won’t coincide with a really bad bout of encephalitis, so odds are good Nigel will survive the experience. 

Will should probably mention the encephalitis too. 

Will is so caught up in the _what he should be doings_ , and the _what on earth did he do that fors_ , that he almost misses Nigel asking a question. There are words, yes, spoken in a voice he does and doesn’t really know, but Will is flickering between watching the road and bridging dark waters in his head, and has to apologize for his not paying attention.

_Everything is going great,_ he thinks, _I am the pinnacle of attentive significant others._

“What?” he asks, less a question and more of a soft pushing of air softly between lips. It’s a weak noise, but better than a loud, mean one he supposes. 

Nigel considers him, head turned, before he gives a bemused nod. “You spend a lot of time in your head, don’t you?”

“Was that your question, or just an observation?” 

“Heh,” Nigel sighs, and Will is trapped for a moment in the crease lines around his eyes. “Seems like I should ask both, but no. Would you mind if I smoke with the window down? The duty-free shop had options, and I bought several of them. I know what I like in Romania, but I don’t know what I like here.”

“No time like the present to find out,” Will quips, grabbing the coil lighter from out of the dash of his car. He offers it, before adding, “I’m partial to Marlboros myself, but I hear they’re different from the kind distributed overseas.”

“Less filtered,” Nigel says with a smile. From the pocket of his blazer, the self-same red and white packaging of Marlboro Reds comes out, plastic wrap crinkling in his fingers. Will’s teeth itch looking at them, mouth tasting of late nights in Louisiana, of tapping a cigarette from a pack in his pocket, sharing with his father, or his homicide partner, or alone on the porch of his rental. “Closer to the ones I grew up on. You’d be amazed how much shit changed in the 90’s.”

“Smoking as a tender young person?” asks Will.

“Smoking as a young person trapped in a shitty town where your options were work at the shitty factory or work in a shitty clerk job, or learn to push the line a little bit between the chaos,” he says, and considers that for a moment. “Americans don’t really appreciate what it’s actually like to overthrow a government and live through it, patriotism aside.” 

( _Pushing other things these days, you’re sure. You don’t see a man inclined to the factory or the clerk job here. It bothers you less than it should - you’re letting him into your house, and maybe into your bed, but you’re sailing on anyway, aren’t you Will?_ ) 

Will rubs his lips together, favoring a split at the corner from the dry winter air. “Comfort breeds complacency. Most people don’t appreciate what it’s like to give something up in exchange for safety. Small things, habits, sure, but not major changes like where they live, or how they identify as a person, or what they identify as family.” He pauses, mouth lifting into a half-smile. “Discomfort doesn’t _normally_ lead to a random spouse overseas, but here we are.”

“And here we are. Heavy stuff,” Nigel says, frowning at the lighter until the promise of curling smoke flares up from the cigarette. “Good thing you seem ok with letting me keep a couple bad habits,” he says with a wink, raising the cigarette and lowering the window. 

“Why, nervous I’m going to do something worse?” 

“Well are you taking me somewhere remote to shoot me?” asks Nigel.

“What? No,” Will huffs, fingers flexing on the steering wheel. What a thing to jump to, though Will reluctantly admits it’s a fair thing to jump to. 

( _You’re certainly capable of it. Will you ever tell him that either?_ )

Nigel shrugs, right hand relaxed in the open window of the passenger door. His hand is a little damp from water running off the windshield, giving the finest spattering of grey droplets on the white shaft of the cigarette between his thumb and index finger. The end of it glows red beneath the ash, and occasionally he gives it an idle tap. 

“Then I don’t see a problem,” comes the smiling reply. “You’re the person who was supposed to show up, as advertised. Came with additional accessories even that weren’t on the description,” he laughs, giving his ring finger a little shake, where the gold glints in the winter’s dim sunlight. “Judging by the road signs, we’re on our way to Wolf Trap, which is your home. You’re letting me smoke as long as the window is down. Presumably, I will be able to stay the night. So far so good.” 

Will finds himself smiling, cheeks dry and aching in the warmth of the car’s heater. With the cold air from Nigel’s window, and the low hum of the engine in front of him, it’s surprisingly cozy - very little traffic, the sun occasionally peeking out from the low clouds that have brought a few more inches of snow to the surrounding countryside. Everything smells sharp and wood-fire fresh. It smells like cigarettes too, but also what Will guesses is Nigel’s cologne, something simple and masculine. 

“You don’t let much about this bother you, do you?” asks Will. 

“This? No. No more than how much time you take to make a decision, as I’ve said,” Nigel says, taking a drag and blowing it out into the chill air. His hair is a mess, but his eyes are creased with humor, and maybe a little tired. It’s easy to forget how long he’s been traveling. “Not a fucking lot.”

Will feels his smile turn into a grin. “My father likes to say ‘shit or get off the pot’ about most life choices. We moved a lot.” 

Nigel gives a laugh. “It’s ‘you’re rubbing the mint’ back at home. Wasting time. Not very fond of mint for myself, always thought it was a stupid phrase.”

“Expressing oils in the leaves,” Will finds himself saying. It’s the kind of thing Hannibal would do, a pleasure to be taken at no cost other than time. He probably does already with that great wave of an indoor planter he has for a dining room wall. It’s the kind of thing Will would do too, hiding from people inside, content alone in a hedge. “Makes it smell stronger.” 

Nigel snorts. “I want to know who the fucker is, sitting in the garden, molesting the herbs. Who does that?” 

“Probably me,” Will says drearily, but still laughing at heart. 

“So you would have heard quite a bit about getting off the pot from your father yelling through the door,” Nigel rebuts, bringing it back home with a flippant roll of a broad shoulder. Will sits on that, listening to the air blow through the vents, pinking his cheeks. 

( _Sharp. Not sharp like Hannibal is sharp, but observant, clever. He’s not likely going to connect with your dark sense of poetry, but he connects with and follows your sense of humor. That’s fertile ground, at least. Everything’s funny through the lens of hindsight and memory - you find yourself anticipating shared experience, laughing at things past together._ ) 

“It made me more resilient to abrupt change and disruption,” Will says, and means more, but isn’t brave enough to explain to what extent. The exit is coming into view, and he has a host of dogs to properly introduce, and spare room sheets to put on the mattress, and the awkward conversations of _what do we do for dinner_ or _how would you like to sleep_ ahead of them. 

“A good thing, that,” Nigel says with another long inhale. “Lucky for me really,” he adds with another wolfish look. 

Neither of them has said any vows yet, but marriage is supposed to be honest - Will is thinking this is more of a “him” thing to work on. He used to be, very much so with people other than himself, but apparently the time in prison creates more reflections of Hannibal than just the occasional murder plot and riddling words. 

Nigel’s hooked tooth smile is a reflection too. 

\---

The house is warm-white and yellow windowed when they pull up, dog heads peeking at the edges of the window panes. Will would introduce it, maybe give the obliging “here’s our slice of the American dream - it’s not much but it’s mine and full of hair” out of a sense of dutiful humility and an actual acute sensitivity to just how much hair there is. He’s proud of his house, but he’s never really had to think in terms of sharing it, and this is about to be Nigel’s home too. 

But Nigel slides out of the passenger side with shoes that aren’t quite comfortable in the icy gravel, feet crunching along the way as he looks it over, saddling his half-finished cigarette behind an ear and putting his other hand in the pocket of his blazer to stay warm. 

“You made it sound like it was a fucking corn field in the middle of nowhere - you have a nice house to go with your nice face,” Nigel laughs, while Will works his way over to him, luggage thrown over his shoulder. “Shit, don’t carry that for me, it’s one of the few things I know I can do.” 

Will keeps moving towards the front door. “You’re the guest, you get the welcome mat at least tonight. Just be glad you don’t get the usual new pack member treatment.”

“And what is that?” Nigel asks, following after, careful with the first step of the patio where the ice has frozen over the wood. Will is charmed to not have to warn him about that - the other man just sidesteps trouble and comes up to the house like he owns it.

Will opens the storm door, and begins unlocking the second - the dogs are now scratching on the other side, anxious to come out in the dying evening light to say hello. “A bath and a night in the isolation cage to get properly acclimated to the other dogs.” 

“Kinky.”

Will, despite him, rolls his neck and tries to hide a hot face in the dim corner of the porch before light from the front room spills out, and with it the seven dogs. They nose his hands for only a moment before they catch sight of a new person and rush up to him. Harley and Jack, he notes, are especially impolite and balance on Nigel’s pants legs with their paws, snouts reached up to get a closer look. 

“I’m going to apologize in advance for your all-black outfit,” Will says a little sheepishly, and moves to remove them, but Nigel’s already got a couple handfuls of dog neck on either side, pulling at ears softly and saying hello. He doesn’t look annoyed - more of that enigmatic relief someone has when they’ve arrived at a party to find that the hosts have a pet, and you can focus on that for a few hours, and ease into where you are. 

Will’s not the only one feeling out of sorts, then. That’s more of a relief than he’d care to admit, but he also feels certain Nigel would resent it if he pointed it out, like it’s telling the Emperor he has no clothes, so he doesn’t. Will watches as he scratches under collars, and pushes the big dogs out of the way of the small ones, and even shy, suspicious Winston, who’s never trusted Alana and never trusted Hannibal, tentatively noses a knee and tentatively accepts fingers pressed against his mottled face and forehead.

( _Dogs know faces, but dogs also know smell and intent, and they are all very grateful for their newest visitor. If they can relax, you can learn to as well. You can learn anything, if you try. Tonight you will try to learn trust, instead of how to gut teenaged girls for field dressing, or how to sow a crop of mycelium, or pull tongues through severed tracheas, or make jokes written in delicate poses and missing organs. But you will have to properly try._ ) 

When they come inside, Will pulls two cold Cokes from the fridge, only slightly embarrassed by his gesture. _Sold on the American Dream by Coca Cola_ , Nigel had said, and it’s a simple thing to pick up at the convenience store the same way it’s easy to pick up a seedy magazine, and cheap booze, and pork rinds this time instead of potato chips because he had a craving. 

“These will probably taste different too,” he shrugs, handing one off. “Cigarettes weren’t the only thing that changed in the 90s - these just happened to get shittier on our side of the Atlantic instead of the tobacco.” 

Nigel looks at the cold condensation of the bottle in hand, all the wagging tails around them, duffel to the side of the kitchen counter. They clink the glass together, and take long burning swigs of soda, equally awkward, equally appreciative of the other behind bravado and willingness to stride past the fact that everything is new, from here on out.

They’re about halfway through each bottle when Will thinks he should probably do a proper tour of the house - explain where the bathroom is, advise Nigel to not look too critically at the kitchen sink which is clean but more historied than he wants to explain, tell him that the bedroom in the front of the house is there so he doesn’t accidentally slip out the window to fall because Will’s sleepwalking is more extreme than the average bear, tell him everything is on the up-and-up, it’s not a haunted cottage, this is home. ( _How are you ever going to catch him up with your entire life? Do you wait until after the paperwork is filed? Do you become a new person because the old one has rot and needs new foundations?_ ) 

Nigel polishes off his drink. Sighs. Leans against the counter with one hip, flicking the cigarette behind his ear to sit instead in the front pocket of his blazer. “Well, flight’s over, drive home is over, introduction to dogs is over - we’re down to the weird part, Will,” he says, setting the bottle down to spin it on the countertop between fidgeting fingers. “The rest of the night. Got anything stronger to help it along?” 

Will nods, secretly thinking he would literally evacuate his body and die if Nigel was about to suggest consummating their marriage. Would it be easier if they did? Food for thought, though realistically, probably not. 

As easy as coke bottles, Will shrugs and pulls the Wild Turkey out of the refrigerator too. It’s technically what started their relationship - might as well help it along while they’re at it.

\---

Will has always considered himself a very efficient drinker. He has a dedication to one color of alcohol at a time, generally takes a while to get drunk enough to be compromised, and was raised on absolutely hair-raisingly bad spirits that came more often in plastic bottles than on the top shelf. He’s not a snob. He’ll drink anything, but knows his own creature comforts, and the point at which he should stop indulging. 

He has clearly misunderstood that Nigel, a purported fan of cocaine but not quality drinks, not only has a comparable tolerance to Will, but a total blank-faced dedication to taking shots the way some people take vitamins. This is maybe one of those **_Soviet Stereotypes I Am Not Supposed to Discuss_ ** issues that Will had benched that merited a quiet look in private. He doesn’t wince. He doesn’t hesitate to accept another. Indeed, Nigel seems entirely happy to hash out their living arrangements with the blessed happiness of one who is not just deep in their cups, but deep in their supply and will need to be replaced the following day. 

Honestly though? It’s probably the best way that it could play out - there’s not really any of the awkwardness that was incoming because the two of them are too far gone for anything but pointed observations made blunt by a buzz.

“So you’re serious about the bed in the front room,” Nigel says with a brusque if good-humored quality, rocking his glass on the table. His cheeks have taken on a ruddiness akin to being in the cold, but they are both very warm at this point, and a little sloppy with their shirt buttons. Nigel, apparently more hot-natured than Will, rolls up his sleeves to cool down in the air of the house, and Will is surprised to see his arms are clean and featureless despite the aggressive neck tattoo and poetry between his fingers. Muscled, heavily veined - someone used to maintaining a certain capacity for brawling. “You sleep there, with the dogs?”

Still thinking about shirt buttons, and that he’s expected to show an interest in that someday though likely ( _theoretically_ ) not tonight, Will stretches his legs out under the table, parallel to Nigel’s. He doesn’t think either of them are quite that far gone. Both have left their shoes on - they occasionally knock each other’s soles absent-mindedly, unbothered, but hardly like amorous affianced men. 

“Do you want me to contradict you, or comment on how it’s cooler than upstairs and very comfortable?” he deadpans, taking a bracing sip of whiskey. “Yes, although the dogs have their own beds. I had some trouble with sleeping before all my exciting criminal record stuff that you got to take a look at.” 

Nigel seems pleased. “Yes, the exciting times you’ve gotten up to. You'll have to show me how to pop the cuffs around here. I’d say let’s share war stories, but it’s not really a first date subject to talk about fucking prison time, is it?” 

“Maybe in some circles?” Will shrugs with a smile, and notes that there’s even war stories to share to begin with - a subject not previously brought up. With any luck, he’ll remember that tomorrow. “Do we make more jokes about cocksucking now, or is that too heteronormative in our present circumstances?” 

Nigel snorts. “Do you always talk like you’re trapped in a rhetoric class, and I'm the dumb shit on the other side of the debate, or do you save that for when you're uncomfortable?” 

“Ah,” Will winces, “comes with the territory, I guess.” 

Probably not just that, but Nigel will figure that out soon enough. However, Nigel doesn’t seem the least bit bothered, leaned back in his chair before leaning forward to balance his face on his elbow and smile. “Or cocksucking, apparently.”

This time Will doesn’t really have anywhere to hide the flush red of his face. He doesn’t know if he’s ever met someone quite as cavalier about their tenuous steps into the realm of gay relationships. It probably would have been smart to resolve this _before_ the commitment to matrimony and the very complex immigration system, but Will doesn’t do things in half-measures, and while he thinks any and all references to it are a chasm to be crossed, there’s a little curl of curiosity of how they’ll do it. 

“You’ve got that look again, like you’re overthinking.” 

Will smiles. “If you’re going to be my husband, you should just know that’s the default setting. You smoke, and I have existential crises every couple of hours or so. Little acts of vice.”

“Little acts of vice are things you swear off for Lent,” Nigel laughs. “Like drinking,” he adds, pouring another glass. “Cheer up, gorgeous. The hard part’s over - all we need to do is walk forward, and if that fails, just make sure we’re in the same pub until we can. The rest will sort itself out.” 

“You can’t really know that,” Will says, flexing an ankle and accidentally catching the side of Nigel’s foot again. Nigel, instead of ignoring that, hooks his foot further into Will’s and pulls until they are locked together. 

“No,” says Nigel, taking another drink, and grabbing one of the pork rinds from the hastily opened bag nearby. “But I’m very good at sorting out things to my liking.” 

There’s a peculiar intensity to his face, something that doesn’t really translate through video camera, just the vaguest hardening of his features. With the pressure under the table against his ankle, and Nigel’s wide hands pouring out another round for them to cheers to, Will feels peculiar as well, a sort of camaraderie between shared physical contact and drinks. All the lights are on downstairs, there’s the clutter of company, and a very self-assured man in the seat across from him. He has flowers sitting in a water glass on the mantel in the living room, the first he’s gotten in years. From the greater perspective of Will Graham’s Year-To-Date, this is a substantial improvement, unknowns cast aside.

Will grins. “Cheers to that then.” 

They clink glasses, the room spins, and they have a laugh as they move on to inconsequential things, just as they did before in their chats. A safe routine. Nigel describes a particularly terrible camping trip in his youth in the Carpathian Mountains. Will switches to memories of Vacation Bible School, and condensation on the inside of his tent from the incomparable summer humidity, and everything is warm, in the memory, and here at the table. 

\---

Will’s out by 2:00 am. It turns out there are earthly limits to a liver that has become unaccustomed to drinking while in prison, and that he’s forgotten a little too quickly what happened last time - he is privately relieved he hasn’t gotten double married this time.

There’s a vague recollection of letting the dogs out to do their business while Nigel is down the hall taking a shower, doing some business of his own, and then having a seat on the edge of the bed. How Will gets from that to asleep is anyone’s guess, but he’s still in the living room, clothed, and not covered in mud or munching on severed ears, so everything is really going great. 

( _The standards have never been lower, you think, but this really shouldn’t be a limbo pole either. What_ **_is_ ** _the next level down, anyway??_ ) 

When he wakes up around 4:00 am, still bleary eyed and side-reeling from the alcohol working through the system, green fleece blanket drawn up over his shoulders, Nigel is out cold too next to him on the bed in the front room. Unexpected, but perhaps not fairly so - Will never did give him a proper house tour, confined to the dinette table, the downstairs bathroom, and the Wild Turkey. Nigel has made the most of the circumstances after a long flight, despite Will’s inconsideration. He’s pulled a different blanket from across the way on the armchair to him, and there’s a respectable space between them, but he’s there all the same, turned away and towards the wall.

Well, so much for the _where does everyone sleep_ debate, but even then it’s not really all that bad. There’s a faint nicotine smell, like he had one smoke before shutting his eyes for the night, but beneath that is the fading woodsy smell of his cologne, a few dog hairs stuck to the black of a t-shirt’s shoulder, and largely silent slumber save for the deep breaths of one well beyond waking hours. 

Will listens to it quietly for a while longer, combined with the occasional shuffling of dogs from the other end of the space, and eventually drifts back to sleep. He’ll show Nigel where the upstairs bedroom is in the morning if he wants it. It’s not as uncomfortable as he thought it would be to share a bed, though the flatness of the blanket between them is wide and glaring in the subtle moonlight shining through the windows. 

\---

Day One, or as Will comes to thematically think through the bulk of it, Ways That Nigel is Not Hannibal, is full of commonplace and seemingly bizarre interactions, made that way by the fact that Will is not supposed to experience them. Marriage has been a pipedream at best, something to be fantasized about quietly, and forgotten. Nigel’s existence in his life, in this capacity, is completely uncharted territory.

So in the spirit of science, he quantifies it in stages, from waking to close of the day. 

  
  


**_Way That Nigel is Not Hannibal #1: Nigel does not wake easily, elegantly, or with any sort of fanfare. Not a single obscure breakfast appliance or housecoat to be seen._ **

Sunlight, as it has a habit of doing, finds the inside of the front room and casts a bright glow on the white walls that it can reach, dogs beginning to stir in the chilly morning air. Will, thoroughly hungover, tries to shut this out by rolling to face where Nigel is still resolutely asleep, one foot kicked out from underneath the blanket and now on his back. There is all the grace in his form of a hibernating animal that has gotten quite comfortable stretching out in his cave. 

Well, thinks Will, at least he doesn’t seem to snore.

There’s a few moments of observation afforded to him this way - the notch in Nigel’s nose is healed some from the first time Will sees it, and the wrinkles he wears easily are relaxed and hidden in his face. ( _You wonder at the notch though - undoubtedly a consequence of a fight._ ) There’s far more grey in his hair that glints in the early morning’s meager light, but his waking presence is so youthful in its exuberance, he doesn’t read as old at all. He’s not, really - only a little bit older than Will himself. He read the profile on the website. He knows his own. Just a couple of middle aged men looking for love in all the wrong places that actually decided to follow through on that. 

This thought chases Will out of the bed and into the kitchen, where he can distract his hands. He checks his emails, he clears his phone texts ( _still largely from Jack_ ), he gets out two clean mugs that are in reasonable condition and cleanliness, and waits in sipping silence when the coffee maker hisses it’s completion. Which sounds...much different than just dispensing coffee. 

The small seems to be enough to wake the man in the other room - he rounds the corner to the kitchen looking a bit like Will feels, but in a comfortable pair of track pants and a black shirt, while Will is still resolutely trapped in yesterday’s clothes. 

“The coffee has reached completion,” Will says, deadpan.

Nigel frowns severely, puzzling through that. “Does that mean there’s coffee available, or that the coffee is proudly leaving a brothel?” he clarifies, voice low and gravelly between popping his neck and rolling ankles on the cold floor.

Language differences, Will thinks with a twisting grin, pouring the brew into the second mug. 

Nigel gratefully takes a cup of coffee with a rumbling thanks that Will feels more than hears, finds that loose cigarette from his blazer, now thrown over the back of a chair in the kitchen area, and wanders out onto the front porch to light up. Not a conversationalist in the early hours, then. He doesn’t really bother to bundle up either despite the white snow outside, breath billowing out in front of him with violent white plumes, and just rolls his head back onto the back of the wicker chair. Moderately tolerant to cold, maybe runs hot. 

Will takes advantage of this time to watch him through the windows, giving the other man a moment to himself. Nigel must feel awful between the jet lag and the cheap whiskey, but he seems content enough to sit and smoke without complaint, shaggy haired Max sitting patiently on the planks of the porch next to him. The dog is rewarded with the occasional absent-minded scratch, the kind of passive affection it’s hard to fake. He smooths his own hair between long draws of smoke, feet crammed into his shoes without socks and balanced haphazardly on the railing to stretch his legs. 

( _An image:_ _a hundred times this man has gone home from whatever work he chooses, be it the hated factory, the clerk job, or the slipping between the lines made by abrupt change. You’ll never really know what that work was for, but you feel confident it was the same slowing at the end of the day you see in hundreds of such men, where he kicked up his feet the same way, and was tired the same way, and wanted someone to sit with him. He didn’t ask for people to alter themselves, or force it on them. His violence is coiled as a spring is - utilitarian, and uncomplicated, and with singular purpose._ ) 

So Will goes to sit with him, coffee pot in hand, and tops him off.

  
  


**_Way That Nigel is Not Hannibal #2: Nigel does not phrase things delicately, and clearly is unafraid of speaking his mind._ **

“Sorry about falling asleep on you last night,” Will says while the coffee pours into the mug. “Did you want cream or anything with that?” 

“If it got any weaker, I’d fucking fall back asleep,” he grumbles, “but if you have sugar, I’d take it with that in the future.” 

Will contemplates rolling his eyes. “I can throw the grounds directly into your cup next time, if that would do it for you,” he says with a lilting grumble of his own, but rather than take offense, Nigel gives a laugh in reply.

“You’re not a housewife and I’m hardly going to expect one - from either of us. Shit, how weird would that fucking be,” he says into his mug, talking a long draught, not flinching at it any more than he did at the whiskey. 

“I suppose we’ll just starve between the two of us,” Will says, leaning into the other chair. “Or live off of snacks from the corner store.” It’s a wild irony - Hannibal the gourmand, versus Nigel the urban club rat, more comfortable with the gas station food than his doppelganger was ever going to be. 

“The usual solution to this dilemma is to buy food out,” Nigel replies, blowing another long train of smoke in the air. “Surely there’s a McDonalds or a Starbucks between here and the next grocery store like most civilized countries. I guess there are worse fates than no one wanting to be the one on breadbaking duties.” 

The dogs nose at Will, before adopting Max back into their ranks and helping themselves to the yard to sniff and take care of themselves. He owes them a walk - maybe later, when the sun melts down some of the path to the creek. He should show Nigel the property. He should check to see if Nigel even has shoes that are good for walking in snow.

Will watches the dogs over the railing. “Kind of a long winded affair, breadbaking. I have to go to work again someday - not a lot of time for hobbies.” 

“Do you like working?” Nigel asks, completely serious. “Would you prefer breadbaking? I didn’t plan to sit out in a country house for the rest of my days without something to do - having a husband isn’t exactly a full time job.”

“I hardly expect you to finance my life,” Will says with another sip of his own coffee. On analysis, Nigel’s right - not very strong, needs another scoop or two to pack a proper punch. Between that and how this conversation is going, the second hangover of the month isn’t going much better than the first one after all. “Hell, I need to arrange for a clerk to oversee vows so you can legally stay and get a driver’s license, much less have you work to cover me.” 

“Those are short-term requirements for our arrangement. I am asking what you want for the long-term,” says Nigel, like he’s brokering a deal. 

( _To have the best dig you could ever make at the people that left you behind; check. To not be by yourself; check. To be valued for something other than your empathy; check, because you never bring it up, not once. To try your hand at normalcy, to have someone that will hold you if you can stop baring your teeth long enough for them to try; in progress, pending you checking your teeth behind your lips._ ) 

Will cracks his fingers against the armrest of the chair.

“I just wanted you,” he says, tempted to hide behind baroque phrasing but pushing forward anyway - this is a man who wouldn’t appreciate it, and Will is a man that knows how to shake off his habits for someone else’s. “And you promised the rest would fall into place.”

Nigel smiles, satisfied. He looks unexpectedly energized by that, and Will, despite the sore feeling of forcing himself to be truthful, is relieved to see it. 

  
  


**_Way That Nigel is Not Hannibal #3: Nigel does not have issues with bluntness, or more accurately, Nigel does not beat around the bush._ **

“Good, because I’m a goddamn treasure,” Nigel replies cockily, standing and swearing when his feet slide a tiny bit on the damp planks, not quite as smooth as planned. Will politely ignores this, charmed and distracted for a moment from his sour mouth and headache, and steps out in day-old clothes to call the dogs and step back inside. 

Unpacking for Nigel is an incredibly simple affair - there’s really more questions about what he probably needs moving forward than where to put things. Will is privately happy that when Nigel sees that his things will sit just as importantly next to Will’s in the drawers, he’s quite effusively happy to talk over the two of them and fill any gap in conversation, while he idly scrolls through a store catalog online for pickup at the mall in Tysons. 

( _You don’t really give him a budget because as long as he doesn’t want a Hermes wallet and some snakeskin boots, you think you can handle it as a thank you and as a debt to his willingness to push past your surliness, but when you come back from the kitchen to pay, you note that it’s already done - nothing to pay for, receipt neatly emailed and pickup scheduled for the following day._ ) 

“Years and years of handling my own business doesn’t end at the altar,” Nigel explains later, hair slicked back following a shower and mouth minty fresh next to the base notes of his cologne again intermingled with the smoke smell. He must see Will’s mouth undoubtedly twisted into a moue of displeasure. “Though you’re certainly going to have to actually take me to one if you want to play at being daddy,” he adds, looking pleased with himself when Will laughs against his gut reaction of ducking his head and quietly dying somewhere underneath the house from embarrassment. 

Will schedules the civil ceremony for next week. A very kindly older Jewish lady named Naomi who will oversee it informs him over speakerphone under no uncertain terms to be good and have his marriage license ready to meet her in Reston, and preferably to also have the other groom. 

“I’ll make sure he does,” Nigel adds off-handedly in the background, and rather than sounding ominous, it’s an inside joke. ( _Down the hatch - marriage is a medicine, and as your new mantra goes, all or nothing._ ) 

  
  


**_Way That Nigel is Not Hannibal #4: Nigel’s manipulations are less manipulations, and more so honest preferences communicated poorly._ **

When Will gives Nigel an actual proper rundown of the house, explaining where necessities like laundry, and cleaning supplies, and toiletries, and the very nicely appointed spare bedroom with the clean sheets and bedside table and lamp are very ready for Nigel should he so feel inclined, Nigel sidesteps the issue. 

  
“Isn’t it kind of hot up here?” he asks.

“Well, yes, heat rises,” Will explains, because Will explains everything out of habit when he’s not doing it out of spite. “It’s supposed to snow again later tonight, so you’d definitely be more comfortable this way. I’m sorry I didn’t show you it last night,” he adds, scratching at his neck.

“I like the cold,” Nigel says with a shrug. “I’d much rather be downstairs with you and the rest of the crew anyway. The old house with the empty upstairs is less of a concession to privacy, and more fucking creepy than I think you were intending.”

Will puzzles over this. “You don’t want space to stretch out?”

Nigel, in turn, is shaking his head slowly with an incredulous smile, that eye-tooth hooked over the edge again. “Not if it means I live the first half of a horror film alone on the second floor. Even the clothes are downstairs for god’s sake.” His amusement comes easily to his face, and Will, for not the first time since their first call, is relieved to just understand: _very cute, but don’t leave me up here, don’t exile me._

Nigel ends up waving him on, sticking the empty black duffel into the bedroom closet with a frustrated edginess that Will suspects borders on actual irritation. They can revisit it later in the evening, if it matters - it is kind of barren up here these days with him and the dogs all clustered in the common spaces. Maybe he should move everyone back up to make it less weird all around.

( _Basic courtship rituals of a feral Will Graham - create den in mutual space so as to not make future life partner feel like they’re at a hotel. Share amenities and feelings the way that normal spouses are purported to do. Chant to self that this is all going to be ok. Remember that this isn’t supposed to be temporary, and you have to care for your husband the way that you’re supposed to care for the dogs at a bare minimum, and you’d never leave a dog locked in a room alone._ ) 

Nigel stays in Will’s orbit for the rest of the afternoon, the two of them touring the not-at-all-creepy shed as a follow-up to the definitely creepy emptiness of the upstairs bedrooms, eating chipped beef on toast for lunch because Will can at the very least do that, with glasses of water because both likely need it, and talking of what Nigel can do to entertain himself until his green card arrives because someday they’re going to have to address that particular elephant in the room. Options facetiously thrown around include whittling, taking brisk walks in the fancy suburbs of Wolf Trap, and trying to cut the dogs’ nails if he can catch them, because Will really doesn’t know what to offer. 

The other man takes this in stride with his usual candor. “Or masturbate furiously. Seems like this is going to be a very maidenly exploration until next week. Nobody can say you’re easy, Will.”

True. Will has not been an easy person in any capacity for a single day in his goddamn life. Will doesn’t really know how to reply to that other than crack his neck, hum around a grin, and say “or that.” 

\---

They end the daylight hours with the dogs outside, stepping over slushy snow and the disguised brush in the fields. They end the nighttime hours ordering McDonalds, because Nigel suggested it. Apparently, this too is different in the States and is far shittier. ( _“Absolutely disgusting,” Nigel says around his burger and fries, and you snort your amusement around the straw of your chocolate shake. “Doesn’t look anything like the picture.” As far as date #2 goes, it’s an easy and relaxed one, one you come home to with spare fries to throw to the dogs in exchange for tricks, and try not to drink until you're sick again._ ) 

Will doesn’t have a TV, and Nigel doesn’t have his own transportation, so in the absence of liquor and not wanting to just float off to bed and will himself to sleep in the darkness of the front room while Nigel attempts to respect that, Will decides instead to take a shower and relax in the hot water until the steam can carry off his anxiety. There’s a tenuous agreement that the bathroom isn’t one to be talked through - not having cohabitated with enough people to know for sure, Will is uncertain if this is a general agreement between men, or if Nigel’s seemingly endless curiosity truly ends where the bathroom begins. Whatever the case, this works for Will - he puts on proper nightclothes, properly slides under the sheets in the front room, and quietly reads after the pack is settled and Nigel takes his own turn in the sanctity of the shower. 

Nigel appears an hour or so after, having roamed over his own email on his cell phone, and what sounds like a private conversation with someone back home in genial, familial tones from the porch again, taking in winter air and heaving it out in clouds of Marlboro Red. Seems he’s ok with them, his first pick. ( _Like you. Or are you? Does he wonder the same?_ ) 

He slides into the bed in the same black shirt and pants from the night before, totally ignoring his guided tour of the house upstairs from the hours earlier, and settles in quite easily in the front room bed, Will stock-still on his side having turned off the lights a while ago. 

“Is this still ok?” comes the question in the dark.

“Was this important to you before?” Will asks, dodging an answer. 

There’s a long pause - he can’t see it, but Will can imagine the flatness of his face, a rare opportunity for the bravery to fall away where it can’t be seen in the dark of the room, at least not now with the moon too high to come into the quiet of the living room. 

“Shit, it’s probably the part I missed the most,” is the sharp reply. 

Will nods, and pulls back the green coverlet, nodding to the empty space. “You should probably actually get under the sheets this time, not just hang out on top of them. You looked like you had been abandoned at a frat party and stole a decorative blanket to make it through the night.”

“Do you keep decorative blankets as well, or are you just fucking with me?” Nigel asks, sliding underneath, but maintaining what feels like a respectful distance. Friendly distance. Not sharing breath distance, but close enough to hear it. 

“Good night, Nigel,” Will replies, rolling to face the dogs instead, eyes closed to adjust to the idea of sharing this and what that feels like, the gravity of another person bowing the mattress. 

“Cocky little shit,” he hears laughing over his shoulder, and feels an echoing lift to his lips. “Good night, Will.” 

Will manages to fall back into a light sleep eventually, listening to the rise and fall of breath next to him, though he does end up rolling away from his would-be husband’s face when the cut of darkness in the room strikes Will with the shades of delicate plants in fancy dining rooms, and the poor lighting of the mental hospital. ( _Not Nigel’s fault. Maybe not even yours. You’re culpable, because you chose this face over all the others, but you were never responsible for what the other person who shared it did to you._ ) 

Will wakes again when Nigel accidentally kicks him, one warm foot pushed to the back of his calf in the earliest morning hours, where it stays quite insistently. The feeling of it is grounding, once he gets past the initial annoyance of being woken up. He’s surprised to find he still doesn’t mind it, the same way he didn’t mind the dogs sleeping on top of him. The cigarette smell, the cologne, the rush of someone else’s breath, sharing his space, sharing his coffee and his car. All of this is welcome, even if it is weird and new. 

It doesn’t strike Will until he’s closing his eyes to the dim night glow, when he’s running again through everything that’s happened so far with a hazy ( _happiness-anxiousness-pleasure-_ ) wonder that Nigel will be quite hard to get rid of if anything ever goes sour between them. Just as he promised. 

  
  
  
  
  


**Notes for the Chapter:**

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> What do you think, should Will show an ankle next chapter? Thanks for bearing with my shy groom - we're trending decidedly less playful and more tactile next time. ♥


	5. a lesson in sharing resources

Time, much like in prison, marches inexorably on with or without Will’s permission. It happens in scattered, small events, but there’s no such thing as a breather, at least not the kind he’d like to have.

( _Disappearing to the Florida Keys with a catamaran full of dogs and a newfound appreciation for freediving is less of a breather and more of a radical lifestyle choice, but you are currently not accepting criticism for this. You are getting married to some random internet person that looks like your ex-therapist instead, and you think the catamaran and dogs might actually be a compromise._ ) 

While Will has made efforts to reclaim his narrative by proposing what he supposes is the emotional disaster equivalent of a shotgun marriage, with someone he talked to once or twice and seems to have made a mess by doing so, and now they’re in his house, asking if the stores around Wolf Trap are very likely to have what sounds like it’s some sort of corn puff snack, or if he can borrow an hour or two of Will’s time to check out the car dealerships in Tysons Corner…

But this is Will, digressing. 

Will has made every effort to take control of his life in increments, even if Nigel is unto himself somewhat uncontrollable. He goes to bed at a set hour. He uses the brand of toothpaste he likes best even when Nigel makes a face and says it tastes like aluminum foil. He takes blistering hot showers to forget the lukewarm kind dealt out in five minute increments in prison. He absolutely refuses to go into Alexandria, or DC, or Baltimore, or anywhere else that has more than the average grocery store’s worth of people inside of it while he’s rebuilding the armor of how he defines himself, and how that definition works with his newest stray. Everything is back to basics. 

Nigel respects these things, because while Nigel occasionally plays at dumb, he’s not. He’s intelligent but lazy in his manner, a big crocodile sunning itself on the lawn. If something is important, and very little seems to be when it comes down to it, Nigel will advocate for himself gently at first, and then absolutely just do what he wants if Will continues to waffle on the subject. It’s kind of a relief when he does, and he’s no longer responsible for ensuring someone else’s happiness. 

( _“Fuck, no I’m not taking a cold shower. We can wait an hour to go into town if that’s the difference between cutting glass with my nipples and being appropriate for the eyes of the wealthy grandmothers in the market.” You tell him the wealthy grandmothers would probably appreciate his charity if he took the cold shower anyway, and he just snorts and insists he won’t be prostituted, foreign bride-groom or not._ )

( _“While I appreciate your efforts to create a little Berlin Wall in the middle of the bed, the mattress really isn’t big enough for one, and if getting kicked in the night is all the action I can expect, then I am prepared for kung-fu, sweetheart.” You try not to flush at this, rolled blanket still in hand and being pulled from the foot of the bed to press between the two of you, and almost put it in place anyway to treat it like a body pillow, because you are a resentful shit when the mood takes you._ ) 

( _“I’m afraid I have to insist on putting your phone away when you’re trying to type. You look at it like you expect it to draw a gun on you.” He’s right, you know. It’s just not the kind with chambers and triggers._ ) 

This is how the first four days pass, with warm sheets in the morning being traded for cold air and the smell of coffee and cigarettes on the front porch. The drawers gradually fill with clothes from the mall that are picked up in two separate runs - nice things, mostly in black, but with the occasional ridiculous shirt which Will is beginning to think of less as a matter of personal taste, and more of a method of encouraging people to underestimate his occasional strange stillness and forceful statements. 

“Kiwi fruit on a pink button-up?” Will asks, watching him fold it into a tidy roll the same way the white shirts are pressed into Will’s side of the space. “Stars on your shoulder epaulets? Should I expect a bomber jacket with some tigers next?” 

“Do you know where I can get one?” Nigel asks, never missing a beat. “I don’t think I’m ready for date night without it.”

Will just huffs, not unlike one of his own dogs, and let’s Nigel do what he wants. Nigel does the same for him. He can’t make everyone else in the world follow suit, with a growing inbox of unanswered emails, voicemail, and texts. He can’t control time, but he can at least walk into and away from things at his choosing, and his fiance given to him in a caprice of fate won’t even question it. 

\---

By day five, Will has made some sober frank observations to go with the drunk ones he’s gathered between long distance calls, their first night together after the airport, and three others that consistently have included some kind of drinking and testing each other’s edges over fast food. 

Nigel, as it turns out, is a person of extreme contradiction. 

This isn’t a dealbreaker - to clarify, Will finds him incredibly straightforward about what he is and isn’t about. He is not contradictory in the sense that he is a contrarian, objecting to suggestion or the things that Will can provide. He is unerringly reserved in this regard, not particularly picky, and as pleasant as Will thinks he knows how to be between his restless energy, cigarette flicking fingers, and what is a fair amount of trepidation about their learning how their edges fit together. It’s gratifying to know he has his own struggles in this arena. Will is practically neurotic with them, and as a person casually being referred to as having neuroses, he thinks this should mean something.

It’s more that Nigel has duality in his wants and needs. When he needs a minute to check his emails on Tuesday morning, getting out a busted laptop of his own to put next to his cup of coffee, what he really wants to do is check his emails in the chair next to Will and grumble semi-audibly in Romanian. ( _You don’t ask what he’s grumbling about - you suspect he wants you to ask, the way that people will yell “oh my god” when they see something irritating, but don’t actually explain what they’re shocked about. You wait for him to elaborate, not wanting to look nosy, but very amused at the gambit._ ) When he goes through his new clothes to try them on, he actually wants Will to sit there and tell him if they fit, if they’re complimentary, if he looks good in them. If he’s going out for a smoke, he wants to go out for a smoke, but he’s going with all the dogs, and Will is following after because walking with the dogs is a very different thing than walking for a smoke break. 

The walking of the dogs to smoke a cigarette, as Will fears, is very effective in making Will leave the house in tow with everyone else, but also in making him crave a cigarette the way he assumes a meth addict has a good scratch at their skin at the idea of another hit. He manages to get through three of these numerous walks before he breaks. 

It’s a chilly grey afternoon that promises snow. Boots are crunching in the melt that’s already strewn about, hardened from a few sunny days. There’s the smell of a woodfire somewhere nearby, and the low hanging cirrus clouds that trap them in this moment in time. 

They are four days away from their civil nuptials with the nice old woman who has declared that she insists on them dressing for the occasion if she’s going to oversee a marriage. “You may be a couple of studs instead of a guy and a gal, but I expect a certain decorum. Find a suit. Get a boutonniere.” Will promises all these things and more - it might be the one thing about getting married that he recognizes as normal and actionable and not directly related to legalities and the brokering of personal property. 

Per usual, that idea leaves him a little out of sorts. 

Nigel is the smokestack of a train to his side, eyes glassing over the tops of the trees and absentmindedly pushing Max down. The dog is persistent in pressing against the ungloved hands that press on furry shoulders - Will knows this to be that Nigel is bad about handing off his french fries night over night with very little consideration for the habits he’s building. As a lifelong smoker, it’s very likely Nigel doesn’t give two fucks about habit forming activities. 

The smoke from the cigarette gets blown in Will’s direction - temptation rears its head again, lips rubbing against each other in memory of the feeling of the white paper and filter rolling there. 

“Did you establish what kind you like?” Will asks, with no context. 

Nigel, not an idiot even if he isn’t a wunderkind doctor of multiple disciplines, shrugs. “The Marlboros are fine. Harsh, but fine. Takes me back to buying loose Carpațis before all the regime change shit, honestly.” 

“Feeling nostalgic for the old country?” Will asks. 

Nigel gives one of those smiling sighs he deals out between the occasional piercing comment. Not an idiot indeed. “No more than you’re feeling nostalgic for a little something you like too. How long ago did you quit smoking?” 

Will turns his head up into the greyness of the sky, considering. The wood smoke smells nicer than the cigarette. He wouldn’t be able to get the fullness of it if he hadn’t quite years ago, but by that argument, his liver is a shadow of his twenty-something self, he’s probably a candidate for more exotic auto-immune diseases as he ages, and a serial killer wants to be his friend. What’s the point in aestheticism? “Ten years, maybe. No, eight.” 

Nigel nods. “Never goes away. Stopped smoking for awhile at someone else’s request for a few months, and what bullshit that was. Went straight back to it a month later when it didn’t really do anything other than make me miserable.”

“Make a lot of compromises for marriage?”

“More than she thought, certainly.” 

That goes quiet with the field and the dogs running through it. Another inhale and exhale, snaking between them in vapor. They don’t really touch on each other’s pasts at this point. The entire enterprise between them is a kind of escapism, so why would they? 

The ember at the end of the cigarette glows orange. Will puts out a hand, two fingers held in a V towards Nigel. 

“Falling back on a bad habit after all this time?” Nigel asks, not handing it over immediately, but dark eyes glimmering with something like amusement and pleasure. He has something Will wants - something other than the steady companionship and the ashy blonde-brown hair and high cheekbones of the phantom in the room.

“Taking up a mutual hobby,” Will replies, and takes a long drag. The filter is damp from Nigel’s mouth, but it’s warm in the winter air. He doesn’t wince, even if he does want to curl away from the burning heat as he draws in. 

They pass it back and forth, dogs running between them. It’s the closest intimacy they’ve shared, even if a bit prudish compared to literally any other fifth date. Sharing a straw is intimate. Sharing an umbrella is too, by Japanese standards, says Will in a babbling moment of trivia sharing and silence filling. Nigel laughs, breathing in the grey evening and breathing out poison like it’s champagne between them. 

Will breathes that in, and thinks it’s nicer when this isn’t done on the stoop of the precinct office, or alone between taking testimonies. It’s kind of like sharing a wine glass after sessions, but there’s nothing on the line, and Nigel doesn’t have a pointed comment for him with each shortening of the cigarette butt. 

\---

They share almost every time Nigel pulls out a cigarette and they are together after that. Morning coffee tastes like the end of a police beat with mugs steaming in the cold, passing things between them, but better. There’s the spiciness of someone else’s cologne. There’s warm steam from the bathroom while he half-heartedly makes toaster waffles with peanut butter, a surprising shared interest. There’s warm nylon blankets with the satiny ribbon edge, and the press of a warm foot against the meat of Will’s calf. It’s very innocent, all things considered. 

Nigel doesn’t push for more. He just insists on maintaining their scheduled appointment. They get the marriage license from a harried looking clerk at the county office on the day that they pick up the second of Nigel’s online orders - this one containing food as well as a handsome pair of black shiny brogues. He has a black suit already - “Used to going to nighttime events,” he explains shortly, and fingers the shiny black lapel of the jacket like it’s personally offended him. No cheaters, no artists’ temperaments comes the thought, written on the website. 

Two mornings before the blessed forthcoming event, Nigel dares to poke at the issue, emboldened perhaps by the stronger coffee Will has been making, and the closer sleeping arrangements. 

“Don’t you just want one of your own?” asks Nigel, offering the pack where at any point Will is free to be independent and keep his own cigarette at the ready in the pocket of a flannel shirt, the way he used to next to his notepad and ink pen. 

“No,” says Will. 

( _It’s different when you take one for yourself. You’re taking in someone else’s company and their consideration when you flick the white paper between the two of you, the tease of what Nigel’s air and his patience tastes like. He’s going to be your husband, so why wouldn’t you? You would never ask this of Hannibal as you are now - you wonder if given another week, month, year that you wouldn’t be taking the fork from him to enjoy meals. You could have asked for a key. You could have asked for his help getting out of prison, for real, not the fake pretty wet eyed asking that you did._ ) 

( _This is safer._ ) 

Is this what their marriage is going to look like? Will considers that a lot, more than he should when weighing in the newness of their acquaintance. Maybe there’s a point at which a hot-blooded man that’s used to having his way starts looking elsewhere because Will can’t get his head out of his ass long enough to appreciate that there’s a hot-blooded man who thinks he’s attractive, pretty-eyed, and smart living in his house. Which, really, would follow his entire college dating history to a ‘t’. Will knows Nigel must think about this too because he makes jokes about it all the time, and the more serious Nigel is, the more he swears, and the more he points things out, even if it’s in the disguise of a grin.

The dynamic changes. It has to, if either of them are ever going to be something more than a paper marriage. Nigel said he was in earnest about being married - “til death do us part” he jokes, with the kind of hands that don’t joke much about death. Will’s good at holding his own in a fight, but he likes the easy attention and affections and chooses to overlook this kind of bad signal. Nigel doesn’t foster co-dependency, because Nigel himself is somewhat co-dependent, and Will feels he can do something with that if he ever actually feels afraid of being left alone. 

It’s on the porch in a red-orange winter sunset the over the trees that things make this change for the first time in the week since Nigel arrived. There are two days to their marriage. 

It’s been comfortable and quiet and Will’s just starting to think that their paper marriage might be ok, and that maybe he’s never actually going to have to come to terms with romantic versus platonic attraction, and Nigel’s well-worn looks that flirt with being Hannibal’s, just in a different lifetime. Will Graham can continue fence sitting in everything it seems: jobs, relationships, proclivities to murder, and perhaps sexuality proclivities while he’s at it. 

Excellent. Capital. All according to plan. 

What a sad excuse for a person he is. 

Will puts his hand out for the cigarette and feels fingers place it where it should go. He pulls it back to his lips, and admires the red on the side of the house. 

“I used to hate the country,” Nigel says, looking away, leaned back and comfortable in the white wicker chair that groans under his weight. Will imagines it’s flecking white paint chips onto the back of his new shirt. He imagines Nigel does too, when he leans forward periodically to roll his shoulders. 

“Yeah?” Will says on the exhale, smoke a big cloud in front of him. Will should buy new deck chairs. Maybe as a wedding present to himself. Theirselves. 

“My idea of the country,” Nigel clarifies. “A place for backwards people, unambitious. The young and the intelligent go to university, they find jobs. If you stayed with your plow or your village, you were exactly what you were going to be in twenty years.” 

“And now you’re back in the country,” says Will, testing the edges of that. Nigel nods after a moment, taking the cigarette back. “Think you’re much different from your time in the city, or are you exactly what you were going to be?” 

Nigel smiles, laughing, just something that passes the lips. He’s never been one to laugh out loud in their time together. He’s easily amused, but disinclined to show it. He waves his hand back and forth, embers scattering uselessly on the porch. A dog or two looks at him with vague betrayal. 

“I’m the fucking same mess,” he says. “A smarter one. Know myself better, definitely have more skills, probably more problems, but the same. It’s appropriate that I’m out here after so long avoiding it.”

Will isn’t quite sure how he’s supposed to feel about that. They’re each other’s first conversation and first attempt at this enterprise, but they are good at pretending that they aren’t actually each other’s second choice, somewhere in a progression of choices. They’re redrawing borders to make the other fit, but there’s lifetimes of context missing. 

( _Even you aren’t good at admitting sometimes why he’s here beyond being good, affable company. He’s handsome, predicated on the perceived handsomeness of others. He’s familiar, because the shape of his hands and how he crosses a room were someone else’s first. You’ve learned the difference, but the similarities are persistent._ )

( _You’re determined to make it work. It’s more fair to you both if you do._ ) 

“My house is about as country as I could get for the area,” he says, and doesn’t think about the last half a year of miseries, because today there’s not much value in expounding on them. Harley is licking the fingers of one hand, and Winston is laying between them, sighing heavily, and it’s not too cold. “I’d like to think I rate a little above the average cowherd or farmer, but realistically I’m not really much better than the average cowherd. Problems feel the same at the edge of any fallow field, university education or not.” 

He puts his hand back out for the pass again. It sits by itself in the wind, frost chilling the fingertips. He flexes them idly. 

Will doesn’t get the cigarette back, but the heat of a mouth at the palm of his hand is new. The scratch of five o’clock shadow, the firm line of a chin, the measured breathing of someone just taking in air, not gulps of nicotine smoke like it will order the day and align desires with each break. He looks over, not quite aghast, but tired and watchful. It feels nice. It feels unfamiliar. 

It feels like as soon as he feels it, it’s over - Nigel withdraws, and brings the cigarette to his mouth, and Will thinks either of them might say something smart, but no. He leans from one chair to the other, holding the embers away from them both, and presses his mouth to Will’s, sharp-toothed, determined. 

It’s a kiss, certainly. Nigel steals the breath from him, worries the winter-chapped corners, nips more than bites like it’s play. That feels right too, though - that’s Nigel through and through. There’s nothing he seems to want from Will. Maybe he thought Will looked good in the sunset, or he just liked whatever Will said, and this is the best testament to that. Physical affections are supposed to be the easiest to express and understand. 

Will doesn’t need to be sick to understand, the way that Hannibal thought he needed to be - he just needs to need someone else, and Nigel wants so desperately to be needed under all that cavalier humor and unsolved aptitude for darker things.

( _That’s you, that’s you, that’s you._ )

Will sighs through his nose. He can get behind that. He can give as good as he gets. The light is turning pink with twilight, and the glow of the lamps from inside the living room is warm and it’s too frosty tonight to actually stay on the porch, but this is better than the dampness of the filter. This is a taste of someone else’s air, properly. 

\---

They go to bed the way they always go to bed, two long and lean statues condemned to share a pedestal. Will’s almost disappointed, staring into the darkness of the living room, feeling out the coils of the mattress that dig into his hip. He feels different after kissing, even if dinner wasn’t, or the bedtime shower, or the baking soda toothpaste that Nigel scowls around. It feels wrong that the world and the night isn’t different too. 

( _Your lungs are full and alive. You want to stay awake and press fingers to your ribs at the sensation. You want to talk. You have the air to talk - you only need someone to listen._ )

He watches the clock near the fireplace. He counts the number of times buster scratches at his little round bed, an animal at heart looking for a cozy place in the chill of the space. Will keeps his breath tight and close to himself, afraid that the feeling will disappear if he goes to sleep, and he’ll forget what it was like. 

Nigel is very still too. This is probably how Will is surprised by him, snaking an arm over his hip, pulling him into his bulk, and the sleep pants and shirt that are the same but different, the same way Will’s white shirts and boxer shorts are. He doesn’t say anything, just sighs with the same timbre and satisfaction that Buster does when he’s finally done scratching, bed as it should be. 

Will falls asleep to it, the way he’s learned to fall asleep to the foot in his leg, and the stolen blankets, and Nigel’s deep cavernous breathing. 

\---

It’s during the golden hours of afternoon, a day before their proposed marriage ceremony, that things do what things in Will’s life have had a habit of doing recently, which is turn into a fucking disaster. Will would blame the kiss, but he’s been functioning on borrowed time with all the success he’s had getting Nigel into the house. 

He’s beginning to think there should be some kind of proposed gambling pool of how long he can go without an incident. _Zero days since our last injury_ , he thinks and watches a little red roadster fly into the driveway from the rural road.

It’s the kind of car he’d peg on Freddie Lounds, but what he actually gets is a very sweaty looking Frederick Chilton, covered in a mess of blood and other bodily fluids unnamed and preferably unknown. A V8 engine in a tiny car frame - Will is willing to bet his favorite Orvis fishing rod that it's the least subtle euphemistic statement that Chilton could make about himself without actually embroidering “not packing, but competent” on his blazer.

Will forces himself to blink and actually listen. 

“May I use your shower please?” 

“You look like someone got the better of you.” 

“Our mutual acquaintance has gotten rather bold this week, which you would know if you paid any attention to my text messages.”

“We’re really not on a texting basis, Frederick,” Will says with an irritated roll of his shoulders, mostly irritated because now he has to play catch up. Yes, he should have read those. No, he isn’t obligated when entertaining ( _co-habitating_ ) with Nigel and trying to re-establish a base camp on Planet Earth. He takes a moment now to look at his phone like he’s catching up, but what he really does is text Crawford. 

**_Chilton’s here,_ ** it says. **_He doesn’t look like he’s having a very good day._ **

If that doesn’t redirect the APB to Wolf Trap, Will is willing to wager his other favorite fishing pole that Jack Crawford is a moron, as he has occasionally wondered from his cell in prison. 

“Hannibal is setting me up,” Chilton continues like Will didn’t say anything at all. “Similar background, similar aesthetics--”

Will almost snorts. Right.

“--same education...it only makes sense that I’m being made to look like the Chesapeake Ripper. There’s a man _in my wine cellar without a leg_ , Will. Abel Gideon is ruining _three years_ of tax returns with his decomposing body--”

Ah, Will thinks. Hannibal must be tired of waiting for something to happen, and has decided to move forward with his usual whimsical abandon. If you can rightly describe peppering the eastern seaboard with corpses as whimsy, exempting the man in question who undoubtedly would say yes. He’s not sure how Hannibal’s involved, or who exactly is dead ( _there certainly is someone dead if you’re to go by Chilton’s appearance alone_ ), but this screams Hannibal. That he has chosen Chilton to make his move is questionable taste, but much like telling people bull’s testicles are Rocky Mountain Oysters, so too is telling people that the Chesapeake Ripper is Frederick Chilton is unexpectedly funny. 

“Frederick,” he interrupts. “Come inside. Take a shower.” He’ll find a way to explain this to Nigel in some way, but he needs to take a moment to decide how to explain the whole mess to his husband-as-of-tomorrow, assuming no one cancels or has a bout of nerves overnight about it. He needs a moment of calm to make that particular story make sense. It’s not like the online articles about Will’s incarceration and the players in the cast would have painted an accurate story. 

He points down the hall where he should be able to find it, with the casual disregard someone who’s used to living alone does. Frederick stomps past, dropping his bag in the living room after pulling a change of clothes from it, and making a further assumption that Will has toiletries. This is true - they are simply not fancy ones. He gets them periodically from office parties and Christmas gatherings, stored under the bathroom sink, but doesn’t mention them. The 2-in-1 will get the job done. Chilton is on the lam and shouldn’t really be obsessing with these kinds of things anyway. This isn’t Crabtree and Evelyn. This is Will Graham’s house.

This is Will Graham and Nigel Paraschiv’s house, technically.

( _Will and Nigel Graham? Hyphenate? Take his name? How have they not discussed this?_ )

Will feels that out with his tongue, and then the sudden rush of adrenaline that he needs to explain why Frederick Chilton is even in the house to begin with. The assumptions he’s been focusing on aren’t the ones he should be worried about. 

He turns to head down the hall himself, only to come face-to-face with Frederick looking white-faced and frantic, closing the pocket door that separates the hallway from the other living spaces.

Well, shit. That doesn’t bode well.

“Hannibal-is-here-Hannibal-is-already-in-the-house,” Frederick says between panicked breaths, falling to the floor and trying to pull a gun from its holster from the depths of his suitcase, looking at Will like he’s kicked a cat, and Frederick is the cat in question. Will has no doubt given the time and the inclination, Chilton would happily piss directly on his pillow if this was true. Remembering the different pills, sleep schedules, sodium amytal, and smug assurances of Will’s insanity, Will finds he doesn’t care - he just needs to not get shot.

Frederick, with alarming accuracy but regrettable trigger discipline, unclicks the safety and points his weapon.

The little glock pistol isn’t particularly intimidating. Will’s had much more impressive magnums aimed at him in his years as an officer, and at least a few assault rifles in recent months when people thought he was into eating teenagers. ( _And larger cars to go with their V8 engines, but you’re getting a bit off the subject, aren’t you?_ ) Frederick is the kind of guy that is either just bluffing, or is going to pull the trigger out of panic, and Will’s not entirely sure which when he thinks Will is between him, the door, and an escape from the man in the other room that is statistically very unlikely to be a maneater like his counterpart, but that...might take too long to explain given the circumstances.

“Now hold on a second, Frederick,” Will says, licking his lips and putting a hand up, watching the tremble of Chilton’s fingers on the finger guard.

“You’re working with him now?” Chilton sneers, shaking. “Were you always working with him? I can’t believe I thought you were innocent, after all the risk and trouble I went to--”

He doesn’t really get to say much, because true to form, he monologues his way into a proverbial corner, and Nigel has had several days to figure out which of the floorboards creak the most and how to open a door in abject silence to keep Will from waking up in the middle of the night. Chilton probably doesn’t even know what hits him when two interlaced hands come down on the back of his head like an inconvenienced deadlift athlete with a bad attitude. 

( _Honestly, very possible. You and Nigel haven’t had the high school athletics and fitness conversation yet, only that it’s very obvious that Nigel does something to keep his arms corded and ready to carry all the grocery bags from the car to the kitchen in one trip. Way more attractive than you thought it would be - obstinate efficiency is apparently a Will Graham turn-on._ ) 

Chilton falls like a Christmas tree.

Will, surprisingly, feels very little anxiety about this. As a person who experiences anxiety with some private frequency, Will wonders if maybe this is his first step in the direction of sociopathy, which he probably could benefit from accepting things as “positive for me” versus “not positive for me”. It’s not hard to explain stopping a man obviously fleeing from the FBI on the floor of his living room. 

It’s a little harder to explain Nigel standing behind him, grabbing the glock from his grip, and emptying the chamber on it with a professional _snick-click_ , bullet falling to the floor.

( _Ah, there’s that trepidation you were missing._ )

With embarrassing lateness, Will realizes that not only did Nigel run into Chilton as a random stranger in the house, he runs into him as an actual intruder into the bathroom. Nigel is wet, _furiously hairy chested, wow_ , barely clothed, and looking at his collateral damage on the floor with the kind of irritation that someone that was enjoying themselves does when the phone rings at the wrong time. 

He was already in the shower. Apparently not much inclined to share either. 

Nigel examines the gun for a moment, and then with the frightening aptitude that Will has only guessed at and not yet seen, field strips it until it’s three neat parts, barrel falling to the floor to be forgotten. 

Will stares at Chilton. He stares then at Nigel. He stares again at the chest hair and muscle. 

There’s a lot to take in here.

“Shit, Will,” Nigel says, reaching for a pack of cigarettes on the kitchen counter, still dripping wet from the shower with his jeans unzipped over his briefs. The line of black that they cut at the top of the denim is distracting the way black bars in censored tapes are. Will realizes very shortly after this thought what the black bars are typically for, and makes a deliberate decision to look down at Frederick looking pale and miserable instead. “Sounds like you’ve got all kinds of strange men in your house from time to time. Should I be jealous? First me, this guy, and whoever he keeps going on about.”

( _No. Well. Maybe of one of them, the strangest of the bunch, but isn’t Nigel arguably the new champion for that title?_ )

“Don’t smoke in the house,” mumbles Will, and Nigel lights up anyway with a silver zippo that has absolutely no business being readily available in crisply washed jeans. Did he summon that from the nether? Is the ability to smoke on command some sort of superpower he’s cultivated, and he only needs the tobacco to fulfill his dark, nicotine-scented purpose?

“Mr. Popular,” he says affectionately. “Here’s another one now,” Nigel adds with a strange smile as the sound of the gravel outside crunches underneath the treads of tires. When Will looks out the window, head still magnetically drawn to the image of Frederick on the floor of the hallway and struggling to ignore it, Jack Crawford’s car is coming to a speeding halt at the front of the walkway. 

“Shit,” he says, as one does when they stub their toe, or drop a box of nails, or are about to have a prolific amount of events to explain that have occurred in the course of a week. The unconscious man on the floor doesn’t help. The Hannibal clone in his distinct mode of dishabille, chest bared, smoking like a train engine with the dogs dancing around his feet nervously isn’t much better.

\---

Jack Crawford, it seems, agrees. He pulls his gun for Chilton, he puts it back up to Nigel, and back down to Chilton with a befuddlement that Will normally sees in the dogs when a treat disappears underneath a cup, forever lost to the realms of men. 

“Hannibal,” Jack says, with the air of one waiting for an explanation. 

Nigel leans against the doorframe and doesn’t bother to put a shirt on, which just takes it all another level deeper in the depths of Hell. Will is in Hell. This is actual Hell. Nigel just smiles, and keeps working away at his cigarette like he earned it. Will supposes he did. 

“Jack,” Will says. “This...isn’t Hannibal.” He scratches the back of his head. 

Will’s tried to formulate this conversation in his head a few times. He’s also frequently opted to just not have it, even in the safety of his head. He considers never going back to work, or to a public place, and just keeping him and Nigel a secret at the edges of white suburbia, forever and ever, amen. They could very actually move to a farm in Iowa, and fulfill Nigel’s initial assumptions about Will, and life would be easy. Full of corn, missing a few major waterways to fish in, but easy. 

But...Will promised he would do this right. He’d give it the whole effort. You introduce your spouse to people. You include them in your life, no matter how sordid, and unnecessarily convoluted it is, by your own hand or others. Will sighs with a rounded mouth, blowing off steam and eying Nigel who returns it with darting eyes, wide, excited. This is probably the most interesting thing that’s happened to him this whole time. 

Will needs a cigarette. He’s going to have one. It’s his goddamn house, at least until tomorrow, in which case it will be their house. He snatches the cigarette from Nigel’s fingers, arms crossed, staring down at Chilton again. 

“This is my fiance, Nigel,” he says, and takes a drag, still warm from Nigel’s mouth. ( _Just the way you like it._ ) “Nigel, this was...is my boss, Jack Crawford of the Behavioral Sciences Unit at the FBI. He’s probably here to arrest our intruder. He thinks you look like someone we both know.” 

Nigel just puts a hand up. “S’up boss,” he says with a grin that’s partially a snarl. “Seen you in the papers, Agent Crawford.” 

( _Angry. Angry at the intrusion, angry to not be clear at what’s going on, but professional even in the face of a deal gone bad. You hope he’s not angry at you. You hope he doesn’t think your deal has gone bad, the literal night before the wedding._ ) 

“Shit,” says Jack, wiping a hand over his chin and looking spectacularly tired. 

Will concurs. 


	6. a thing everyone's waiting on

A Mexican standoff, by popular definition, is a case in which two parties or more remain unable to act against each other, guns drawn in equally compromising positions. Be as it may that only Jack is the one with a functional handgun, Will still has the distinct sensation of everyone having lost in some way. 

Trust. ( _ Nigel, you think, who smiles but uses smiles to hide his simmering anger. _ ) Security in the sacredness of home. ( _ You, because why the fuck does everyone have to keep coming to your house? Can someone else volunteer, like this is an unfortunate misunderstanding of who gets to host the book club? _ ) Confidence that there’s only one Hannibal Lecter stalking around the East Coast like a menswear model with Bowie-knife cheekbones and a bad attitude about silverware placement. ( _ Jack, you’re certain, who considers Nigel the way someone considers a moth the size of a standard holiday card - with awe and disturbance. _ ) 

Nigel, despite the anger and the partial naked dishabille, looks like he’s actually  _ won _ the standoff and doesn’t have an appreciation for the precariousness of this situation. This is reasonable - Jack keeps staring at him and his inescapably bare, Tundra-ready chest, not because he’s a golden god ( _ which, really, nobody tell Nigel that _ ), but because his resemblance to Hannibal is so extreme that it’s a bit like seeing the Queen Mum in her underthings. Nigel doesn’t have this frame of reference, so the default seems to be the assumption that everyone is very impressed with his narco assassin talents, and does the spiritual equivalent of waving finger guns at the two other men in the room.

Eventually, Jack clears his throat, and pushes forward with the disaster that is this afternoon. One does not become head of the Behavioral Sciences Unit of the FBI and not know how to hold their chin up in the face of the madness of the universe. 

He looks down at Chilton on the floor, still out cold, and back to Nigel. “I’m guessing there’s a reasonable explanation for all this,” he says to Will, who in a rare moment of irony, is the sanest thing in the room. 

“No,” Will snorts, relishing this irony, “but there  _ is _ an explanation.”

Another awkward pause. Jack’s frown grows in severity.

“Well,” says Jack. “I guess I’ll hear that then.” 

Nigel shrugs, smoking with the kind of poignancy one saves for failed attempts to fix fascia boards on the side of the house, or stepping in the one dog shit that gets missed during yard work on the weekends, or your fiance not being entirely straightforward about the events surrounding their life. As one does, Will thinks with a wince. Nigel, when looking past the cloud of smoke, is  _ still _ unapologetically a damp, virile polar bear of a man in the living room, dripping all over the floorboards. 

( _ After seeing him essentially flick Chilton away like a fly in his ear, you’re half-convinced that might be true, and that this is all a very worrisome fever dream in which you are affianced to a giant ursid that you’ve projected the appearance of Hannibal onto. That further begs the question - would that be better, that you’re just losing your mind instead of actively working towards marrying your therapist clone tomorrow? No, you think, but with the ‘no’ sounding more and more like a question, looking for third-party confirmation. _ ) 

“For the love of God, can you dress yourself?” Will asks, fingers pressed up against the bridge of his nose. At Will’s frustrated look, Nigel gives an indignant snort, like this thought is written in Will’s face. 

“Did you get enough of the view to appreciate it?” Nigel retorts, laughing a bit to himself in the cloud of his own smoke and pushing his wet hair back out of his face to stick to the sides of his neck. Will’s eyes are drawn to this, the way the fine hairs darken with moisture, the transition between throat and strong trapezius holding his proud head aloft. Nigel’s skin has reddened between the heat of the shower and the chill of the living room, and  **yes** ,  **no** , this  _ isn’t the time to think about this _ . But Nigel nods, compliant for a moment, and retreats to the back of the house to presumably cover his body like the prudish American man has requested.

Both Jack and Will listen to his feet stomp down the hall, back to the bathroom. 

Jack clears his throat, looking down at Chilton again, holstering his own gun - back to business. Will’s a little embarrassed with his own flustered response to Nigel, and that’s a bridge he’ll need to cross imminently, but Jack is struggling to cross the neighboring bridge of Testosterone Driven Locker Room Confrontation with vaguely homoerotic undertones when he came expecting Dire Circumstances and Nefarious Violence. 

“Chilton came out to the house thinking that I would help him,” Will explains, fingers still pressed between his eyes. He contemplates just pressing them fully into the eye sockets, and avoid this conversation. “Why did you come alone, Jack?” 

Jack doesn’t answer straight away, cuffing Chilton where he lies prone on the floor. Will would like to tell him that’s entirely unnecessary seeing as Nigel probably could just knock him out again if he looked like he might run, but repetitive brain damage is probably not the answer, even if it seems like everyone else’s to him. 

( _ Don’t think about that. Don’t think about the pills you were given, the shots and lights thrown in your eyes, how no one handled you gently. Your vengeance is slow burning, showering, and dressing in the back of the house, and those things are in the past. _ ) 

“Did you plan to shoot him?” Will asks, listening to the clicking of the cuffs, ticking like the second hand of a clock as they close. Chilton groans, but doesn’t wake. “Because that would be ridiculous. Chilton’s not the Chesapeake Ripper, Jack,” he adds, “though I’m sure the real Chesapeake Ripper thinks it’s hilarious that you think so.” 

“Ridiculous, Will?” Jack snaps, standing and straightening his coat out, cell phone in hand. “Ridiculous, like what? Like having a pod person replica of the man you tried to have killed not that long ago living in your house? That kind of ridiculous?” 

“Well, pod person is kind of reductionist.” 

Jack rolls his eyes. “Graham, your...fiance,” he says, like it pains him to say it, “coldcocked a man and smoked over his unconscious body with a smile. I understand you’ve been having a hard time-”

Will snorts. 

“-but avoiding investigative work? Getting engaged? I swear I’m calling Hannibal when this Nigel guy gets back in the room. I’m starting to think you all are trying to pull something over my head, and I’m goddamned irritated by it.” 

This is a spectacularly bad projection for the evening. “Why?” Will asks, swallowing around panic at the idea of that. “Shouldn’t you be calling the marshals to pick up your substitute Ripper and waste some taxpayer dollars over the coming weeks on a circular investigation? It seems to be a theme this year for the department.” 

“NO,” Jack yells, “I just need to know they’re two separate people, for the love of god,” he adds waspishly. “I know you all think my life turning into a Pink Panther movie is comedy gold, but I just want to go home and eat dinner and not worry that this is some weird conspiracy that all my contractors seem to think is all the rage.”

Will nods. “Great,” he says high and light, “so we’re all arriving at the same point of the mid-life crisis. That’s a relief - I was beginning to think it was just me. You know, with the wrongful imprisonment, and the throwing up ears and all that jazz.”

Jack looks like he’d like to also knock out Will too, but Nigel slides through the doorway again, looking very jaunty in a black tracksuit jacket over his blue jeans. Will dares not ask if there’s anything underneath it - knowing how the day is going so far, zipping the front down will just bring back his many questions about woodland predators, and if there’s some kind of nascent fascination he has with chest hair as a man with very little of it. 

“Agent Crawford,” Nigel says with a lean into the doorframe with a new cigarette, having industriously finished the last one. “Apologies,” he says with a laugh. “I didn’t expect company today, though I’ve certainly expected to meet you at some point. Will’s been very hush-hush about work, but turns out work was on it’s fucking way,” he concludes, shrugging with a hand that comes up to scratch at where his hair is drying against the collar of the jacket. “Isn’t that just the pits, when that happens?”

Jack, looking uncomfortable again, gives Nigel a long glance that jumps from his face, to his hand pinching the butt of his cigarette, to the long tattoo along the side of his neck. It’s the tattoo that does it for Jack, Will thinks, the belt-carrying cheesecake lady that’s very ungentlemanly. Champion of the ring. Hannibal would probably excise his own flesh off his neck before allowing  _ that _ of all things to be engraven on his person. It’s this, more than the open amusement, and the swearing, and Will’s relative ease with him that makes it clear that this is someone Jack doesn’t know. 

( _ You secretly go between thinking it’s uncouth and that it’s charming - no more harmful than a pin-up, something you suspect to be identity forming long before you or even his spouse of unknown years prior were a consideration. Everyone should have something like that - something just for them. _ ) 

“You some kind of scam artist?” Jack asks, and Will quietly dies inside while miraculously still standing. 

“Jack-” he starts, eyes drifting to the other man in the room, but Jack puts up a hand. 

“I’m serious,” Jack continues, “Nigel, that’s what you said right? You into reading foreign newspapers? Saw an opportunity worth taking? Can’t think the two of you have known each other very long, or Will’s been holding out on me for more reasons than I originally supposed.”

Nigel looks away for a moment, flicking ashes from his hand. Beneath him, Max and Buster watch him with the attention typically shown to the most faithful followers of religious dictators, which clues Will into the mystery of a small amount of sandwich meat missing from the refrigerator earlier today. Will smiles, despite the tension and his boss standing next to him, suspicious, and rude in his suspicions. 

( _ Much like the disassembled gun, how much Nigel knows about you is a question that demands attention. Jack’s lack of avoiding the issue doesn’t deserve your criticism - your hesitation does. _ ) 

“Jack,” Nigel starts, blowing another round of smoke, “I can call you, Jack, right? Since we’re all on a first name basis here and all. I like that you keep it casual like that, Jack. I did at home in Romania, but one doesn’t like to presume. Still learning a lot of customs here, fresh from the plane as I am.” 

Jack bristles, and gives one of the thoughtful hard smiles of his own making, usually delivered between harsh statements and warrants. “With the tracksuit I was going to say Russia, but even Will wouldn’t risk losing his security clearance like that.”

Will has to admit he’s never even considered the possibility of losing his clearance before, much less because he essentially purchased rights to engage in conversation with someone matrimony-minded in a country with previous Communist inclinations. Probably not the most FBI-friendly of spouses.

( _ What, like Hannibal would be? _ ) 

“I didn’t realize the Slavs had a monopoly on comfortable active wear, but I also don’t expect the average Yankee to know much about Iron Curtain countries. Shall I ask my mother to knit some doilies to complete the impression?” Nigel asks, appearing very earnest, but grinning behind his new cigarette. “She’s a cunt, but the sow might actually do it to make a point.” 

Neither Jack nor Will has much of a response to this - Jack is not in the habit of offending people’s mothers, and Will continuously forgets he’s about to have a mother-in-law ( _ even if Nigel reportedly hates her _ ), and Nigel’s about to have a father-in-law ( _ who confirmedly hates everyone _ ). 

Nigel waves a hand as though to push the joke aside. “To answer your question, Jack, I’m just another sorry bastard trying their hand at a very specific kind of online dating. Your boy Will here was doing the same. Nothing to worry about - I’d ask Will more about it, if you really want to know. He picked me specifically out of a stack. Isn’t that right, Will?” 

That’s right, Will thinks. A dozen of a dozen women and men, smiling out of little photos in hopes of trying something new, reduced to bite-sized anecdotes and pixels. Educations, hopes, dreams, in-jokes, and carefully-cropped pictures trying to sell a stranger overseas on how wonderful they are, and out of all of them he chooses Nigel. The man that shares the most qualities with someone Will reputedly hates, despite the professed appreciation for cocaine, fucking, and truthfulness, all things that Will is shy of to varying degrees. 

It says something about Will more than it says about Nigel. That Nigel might have looked Will up online and seen what’s whispered about Will and continued forward anyway says something about him, but it’s unfair to make Nigel defend himself in the court of Jack’s opinion. It’s not like he’s taken advantage of Will, or promised him something in exchange for his legal protection through immigration, a difficult impression to overturn once Jack has it. 

He nods in answer, and knows what that looks like. 

Jack nods too, watching Will instead of Nigel, no matter his swagger and teasing the edges of being disrespectful. Will can’t pretend to think there’s nothing not worth noting in that admission. Will’s hardly accepted that he has admissions to make. 

\---

While the US Marshals pack up their ill-timed visitor and drill Will on the details of Chilton’s detainment, it feels like Jack drills Nigel for hours: where did he come from? What does he do for work? Why does he know how to rapidly disarm someone? Why on earth would he be ok with a presumptive serial killer for a husband? 

( _ “He was acquitted,” Nigel says like one announces it’s raining, or they’ll have pasta for dinner out of laziness, or their co-worker is out with the flu. “He likes dogs, he seems to be gainfully employed or at least financially stable, and he is usually honest which I find to be a very attractive quality.” You wince hearing this, feeling eyes on you, feeling the bubbling promise of a Hard Conversation coming in the near to immediate future, because you haven’t really been honest about everything, have you? “Besides, wouldn’t you agree that he’s easy on the eyes?” Both you and Jack uncomfortably stare into the middle ground at this addition, even as your face goes hot. _ ) 

Will tries to stay out of the way, saving objections like “get-out-of-jail-free” cards. Nigel’s a grown man with a clever tongue, who’s historically accused him of being maidenly, and now he is welcome to fend off the first of many monsters at the threshold. Yes, he’s living with Will. No, he’s not asked for money, or had him give his bank account information to any Nigerian princes. If he can’t handle Jack, he certainly won’t be able to handle Alana, and if he can’t handle Alana, the actual unspoken name in the room is going to be an actual nightmare encounter. 

Will has heart palpitations just at the thought of it, and contemplates if he should see a doctor about that. 

Seeing as a doctor is the cause of said heart palpitations, he settles firmly on no. Deliberate medical ignorance is preferable.

Eventually the sun starts westering to the point that even Jack, who himself has proclaimed a desire to eat at home for once, has to concede that without additional resources, Nigel is nothing worth worrying about ( _ for now _ ). He has all the correct paperwork, passport, and all his identifying marks seem to be real and not from a clownish disguise kit and Will’s not secretly shacking up with Hannibal, as though the last couple of months were some kind of bizarre incarceration foreplay. ( _ “Are you serious?” you ask when this is suggested, and Nigel wanders off. “Do you think blue jumpsuits is the kind of sexy roleplay you are implying, or do you think my taste is really that far out of left field?” Jack’s silence is telling, and you make a face that you suspect is a very accurate imitation of a man eating a whole raw lemon. _ ) If Will is crazy enough to marry someone at the drop of a hat, there’s not a whole lot that can be done about that. 

“I’ll update the team on the arrest,” Jack says with a sigh, turning to consider Chilton again, who is less a doctor of psychiatry and an ersatz Chesapeake Ripper as much as he is a crumpled undergrad on a Sunday morning. Predictably, he is still quite unconscious. Perhaps someone should have called a paramedic instead of the police. “But Will,” he continues, “don’t think this ends here. Far from it. I need you back on the horse, whatever your marital status.”

“If you can simply keep what you saw from imploding for 24 to 48 hours, I will consider half your debt to me for throwing me in prison fulfilled,” Will replies in his snidest tones. “Maybe don’t start by telling Zeller.”

“What, imploding before you make it difficult to get out of, or imploding before you can make up a plausible excuse why you’re wanting to marry your psychiatrist without actually marrying your psychiatrist? It’s weird, Will,” Jack presses. “It’s weird, and all the people you know are going to think it’s weird.” 

( _ A little of column A, a little of column B. _ )

“Well that just sounds par for the course,” Will waspishly spits into the cold evening air. “God forbid anything I do in my time on this green earth without at least one sideline comment about how I’m doing it wrong, or that I should be stopped like a supervillain, or a child.” 

“If your reaction to getting out of confinement in a mental hospital is to marry an amorous green card applicant, maybe you should be stopped,” Jack says, frowning severely. “And that’s without even touching the other elephant in the room which you’re too smart to-”

Will just put up a hand and smiles like it hurts to. ( _ It does. _ ) “Why don’t you call Hannibal and work through your feelings on it? I hear therapists are good at these sorts of things. I wouldn’t know though... Good night, Jack,” he snorts, and sees him to his car. “So glad you could visit. I’ll send you an announcement card when it makes sense to. Should I make a registry? We need a new toaster,” he adds, and walks away in the crunching snow to firmly close the door to the house. 

They don’t. Need a toaster that is, but Will really doesn’t know what you’re supposed to ask for as a wedding gift. He should probably ask Nigel. He should ask Nigel about a lot of things, not least of which being how cleanly he de-escalated today’s brewing disaster like he’s been dying to discharge bullets from a magazine as dandelions disperse seeds. 

It’s cold, with everything thrown open as it has been, and Will rubs his cheeks and his ears until all he’s aware of is the crinkle of his hair against skin. He should turn on the heater. He should apologize. 

\---

In hindsight, Will doesn’t know what he expected this conversation to be like. He runs through about ten scenarios in the span of thirty seconds, but none feel quite right, and all of them are painfully fraught with Will’s own issues. 

Nigel is in the kitchen, windows thrown open, red and white carton of Marlboros in front of him while he balances his feet on the edge of the kitchen table and reclines in a chair. He has made a solid effort to blow the nicotine through the screen of the nearest opening, even with the evening air creeping in to make his hair icy cold. Will is charmed to see it curling and lifting away gently behind his ears, not quite dry, not quite wet anymore. 

“Did Agent Crawford get all the details he needed?” asks Nigel, balancing on the back legs of the chair, staring into the light fixture over the dinette table. “Generally a body on the ground is fairly self-explanatory, but I’ve never met a cop that didn’t want to drag it out with some extra paperwork if he wasn’t already dirty.” He sits on that for a moment. “Should I have offered him money?” he adds glibly.

“Jack’s not a dirty cop,” Will sighs, and pockets his hands to stare at the floor. Underneath the round top of the table, he can see at least three dogs eagerly awaiting scraps from the table, Nigel’s hand idly scratching behind Harley’s ears while she drives her face into his leg. “And if you don’t want him digging into more than your sweatshirt and your passport, I’d definitely avoid offering him cash.” 

“No, I suppose you’re right,” says Nigel, smoothing down the hair of the dog’s thick neck. “Not too quick on the uptake, though, is he? Fucking Russian indeed.” 

“Are you upset?” Will asks, standing idly between the kitchen counter and the table. He doesn’t have Nigel’s casualness, the ability to lean and fit into the space he fills. It would feel like a lie to brace himself against the cabinets. It’s not like Hannibal’s desk, or his lecture podium. He’s not working his way through a thought - he’s waiting to hear someone else’s, and that’s a novel inconvenience for Will Graham.

Nigel, for his part, just leans forward and licks his bottom lip. He smiles, huffing a little laugh, the grey curling smoke forced from him. “No,” he says. “I’d say I’m pretty happy, actually. Met the boss, made some new friends...Your next office visit is going to be shitty. I had wondered what would happen when someone pushed you. My face just about fell off now when it turned out you push back.” 

“Heard that, did you? Sounds very schoolyard when you put it that way,” Will replies, cracking an ankle with a roll of each foot. “You don’t care about the fugitive shrink covered in blood trying to take all the hot water and the FBI nosing around your business?” 

“Well I certainly didn’t feel like making room for that poncy jackass in the bathroom. Now if it had been  _ you _ -”

Will shakes his head, going red again and waving a hand to clear the air in front of him. “Don’t smoke in the house,” he says again, as he said before, like a warding chant. Maybe it works if he just says it enough times. Both the request, and the distraction. 

( _ Don’t smoke in the house. Don’t forget to wipe the mud from your boots before coming in. Don’t give the dogs hamburger meat - one in seven will throw it back up. Don’t mix the socks up - you’ve already put on Nigel’s twice on accident. Don’t imply you’re desireable - you won’t be able to handle it if it’s just to be polite, or to fulfill an expectation. Don’t ask questions why Nigel’s face makes you happy and it makes you sad - it’s bad enough you have to admit why you feel anything about it at all. Don’t hold you during a nightmare - you can’t stand being restrained. Don’t tell you your capacity for darkness exceeds your capacity for goodness - you know. You don’t want him to know. You don’t want someone to tell him and you be by yourself again. _ ) 

Nigel raises his eyebrows, but grins again, putting out the ember at the end of his cigarette on a mismatched tea saucer that Will has no idea where Nigel even got it from. Did Will even have that? “I had hoped you’d take it from me,” he says with a hum. “Just to see if I get lucky twice in two days.” 

Will pulls up the other chair. After a moment’s idle hands, he takes the crushed cigarette from the tea saucer, still warm from being held, and grabs the lighter sitting nearby to reignite it. 

“Only tonight,” he grumbles, turning it from side to side. “My house is nice. I don’t want it to smell like a fucking ashtray.” 

Nigel smiles wider. “ _ There’s _ your courage. I was beginning to worry someone had scared it off, and we’d be battling cold feet all day tomorrow alongside your law-abiding anxiousness.”

Will laughs dryly, and takes a drag between coughs, as is their custom, and passes it back over. His hands are still cold, but his lungs are lit and alive again, Nigel’s attention a thing with weight on his chest. “What,” he jokes, “you’re not curious about why everyone’s bent out of shape about you  _ before _ you sign all of the legally binding documentation?” 

“Oh I’m objectionable in every way,” Nigel replies, taking another inhale of his own, fingertips favoring the short hair at the tip of Buster’s ears, who forces his way into a lap. “No matter the nice hair, good English, excellent attitude for business, and papers being on the up and up, no matter how many times boss-man Jack puts a penlight to the watermarks. I have a notably bad temper, sweetheart,” he says, “and I don’t like to share my things. If anything, It’s a new experience for someone to protest that I’m too like someone else, whoever the poor bastard is.”

“You’re not like him at all,” Will finds himself saying. “Not really. I don’t know how I ever thought you might be.” 

“Did you expect me to be?” Nigel sits on that, tapping the cigarette on his knee, leaning back again on the legs of the chair. “And how can you be sure that I’m not?” he asks, eyes cutting to the side, gleaming sharply.

The chair legs creak under the weight, and Will has to fight the sudden urge to tell him to stop. He’s already asked about the smoking, and no doubt a dozen other small things he didn’t pay mind to from the day he brings the other man home. It’s such a small, stupid thing to get irritated about, hardly worth mentioning, a harmless bad habit for everyone except the chair legs. He’s rolled with the punches from day one - what is Will even offering in exchange, really?

The night before their nuptials, Will’s grateful for him. Unspeakably grateful. He wouldn’t have quite dared say stop to Hannibal. Will can tell Hannibal to leave Will himself alone, but the things in Hannibal’s gravity? Alana? Abigail? The tenuous court of public opinion on Will’s mental health? 

“I can’t say,” Will rejoins, taking the cigarette back. “I hoped not. I’m told I have a good intuition for things like this.”

“A man of good taste,” Nigel laughs. 

“I certainly hope so, protests to the contrary,” Will sighs. 

( _ Does Hannibal protest? Or does he think your gruesome taste is excellent? You lack the presence of mind to ask him directly - maybe a lot of your problems would be solved by that, but maybe a lot of them would transform, tessellate, turn in on themselves until they grow beyond reason. You’re afraid to, really. How many bad decisions are you making by the hour? Did you always need someone to hold you hand? _ ) 

“I’m happy you’re here, despite the odds and the seedy origin story,” he adds, staring down at the woodgrain of the table, and uncleaned coffee rings for two sitting darkly on its surface. “I hope sometimes you are too.”

They sit quietly after that, Nigel watching him, Will watching the smoke try to drift through the dirty screens of the kitchen windows. Neither tries to say anything. 

It’s a comfort and a delight to have his face held not long after, to have his chin pulled to the side, to have the air pulled from his lungs. Nigel kisses like he means to steal something from him, hands carded in Will’s hair, holding firm each curl between his fingers. Will is the type to lock the door, just to make sure no one comes in - that’s been the problem until now, his dangerous apathy to knowing what that feels like. 

( _ You didn’t recognize it the first time it happened. You do now. _ ) 

“Shut up,” Nigel says abruptly with a laugh, like he had to say something. “You talk too much.” 

“I didn’t say anything,” Will rebutts, smiling, warm and close. There’s the prickling of stubble against his face, missed during the shower in Nigel’s haste to dispatch their intruder. Will doesn’t dislike it, even if it’s still very new. 

“Not out loud maybe,” the other man replies, and bites at the corners of his mouth like he can hem them closed. 

\---

Nigel is a night owl, on this side of the ocean as much as the one he comes from - this continues in spite of Will’s regular adherence to crawling under the covers at the first suggestion of tiredness, the timeless order of the last nighttime run of the dogs occurring at 8:30pm, and also apparently the raucous events of the day, with Nigel opting to chain smoke on the porch long after the two of them have come to the conclusion that the wedding is still on. Will marvels at that, the same way he marvels that any of the last month has happened. Garett Jacob Hobbs, the copycat murders, prison, those are all bad memories. Everything following that is a revelation, conceived by, and made for him.

From his pillow, Will looks sideways, to the house windows in the front steamed with warm air and frosted at its corners. 

When he heads to bed, he finds Winston sitting prim and proper at Nigel’s knee on the porch of the house where the other man has pulled one of the chairs to the doorway, occupying the hand that isn’t busy twirling a lit cigarette like it’s a baton. Will counts that as the fifth one for the day - if he doesn’t want to be a widower by his mid fifties, he figures he should speak up soon and tell Nigel to ease off a bit. Both dog and man stare out into the cool snowy darkness, as though to scry the next intruder before they can even turn their way up the road. 

( _ You don’t know if Jack actually calls Hannibal, to confirm Will’s story, to tell him of Chilton’s apprehension, or to have a good laugh at what he saw today. You also don’t know if Nigel recognizes that for the threat it is, or if he’s as elemental as the rest of the pack, instinctually aware of danger and disturbance to their home. Both, probably. He could just need to think, in a space that there's not a lot of comfortable spaces to do it. _ ) 

Will spends the late hours curling into the sheets of the foldout bed in the front room, feeling chafed emotionally, as well as physically. Turns out the five o’clock shadow of a man almost double his mass is both aggressive and substantial. While he’d historically think this is too much of a reminder of his masculinity, Will finds instead that it’s a pleasant distraction from everything else. He falls asleep considering the cold glow of the porch light, and his would-be husband’s breath banding around him, a shield or a ward made stronger by the chill. 

He wakes once when Nigel finally comes in - all is quiet, dogs curled into their beds. The silence of the winter night is deep, save for the sigh next to him and the squeaking of the mattress coils as Nigel beds down carefully next to Will. There’s a moment or two of more silence, and the easy hiss of breath through noses, before Nigel curls up beside Will to hold him close, and keep one ear upwards towards the door. Will pretends to sleep through it. 

( _ Dogs, you’ve learned over the years, have a desire to defend, even the newest ones.) _

\---

Will, phenomenal introvert, bug scholar, criminal profiler, and supreme grouch that he is, still has some romantic notions of what a wedding day should be. He doesn’t really know why he has any preconceived ideas of this, short of television and marketing - his own parents were separated while he was very young, he’s attended maybe three weddings in total that were very run-of-the-mill, and he himself has had almost no aspirations of making it to the altar. With no consideration for this, a childish...wish, he guesses, for love, and security, and the promise of understanding despite his being Will Graham persists. 

The green card isn’t something he really foresaw. Or the resemblance to his psychiatrist. Or that he would be one of a pair of men, and the arguably more diminutive of the two of them, which his ( _ admittedly limited _ ) exposure to same sex relationships has a few probably inaccurate assumptions rolled into it. He has a fair number of questions about that last bit that he would like to consider in privacy, but he’s willing to save them for later in the face of all the other things going on. There's a lot here he probably wouldn't have picked out of a catalog. 

( _ A sexuality crisis, while expected, is inopportune when en route to the dry cleaners in Arlington, who has graciously opened early so that you can grab your clothing, pay them, and fuck off to the nearest donut shop where you will buy nothing but plain glazed, and if Nigel intends to be your husband, he will learn that this is literally the only way you eat them, and literally the only form of stress eating you know, courtesy of your father. _ ) 

Nigel doesn’t look at all tired when Will shakes him awake at 10:30am, bright eyed and quick to shower once his requisite needs for coffee and nicotine are sated. They sit together in the incredibly cold morning air with anticipatory dread and excitement, depending on who you ask. They walk the dogs, they trim sideburns, shave faces, find dress shoes, forget lunch. 

It’s not what he thought his wedding day would look like, if he ever had one, or what his partner would be, but it’s not a bad picture. Just different. 

There’s a habitual desire to talk to someone about it - it’s been months since his last therapy sessions, he and Hannibal’s little conversations, but this isn’t the kind of thing Hannibal is interested in. Maybe he’d call it commonplace, or a trauma response, or make some innuendo about “hate being closer to love” than any other emotion, and Will would have no rebuttal because there isn’t one. Tonight would have been their next session, and all of these things would have been thrown in his face in delicately chosen words. Will’s spending it instead with his husband, or husband-to-be in what amounts to almost no time at all. 

He accepts this the way he accepts every adopted stray - quickly, with few hesitations, and what few there are to sit quiet and heavy on a shelf in his mind to turn in his hands later on in the dark of night.  He sleeps better with Nigel, so he has less time to do that, and that’s what’s starting to become normal. It’s not wildly fucking on the beach, or a getaway in the Maldives, or the perfect symmetry of being known by someone and knowing them, but it should count as romantic. Besides, there are no perfect marriages, only perfect disasters, and Nigel teases that Will could be one if he really puts his mind to it - with pretty blue eyes like his, how could he not be? 

\---

Conventional wisdom from the internet suggests that the average American wedding takes a year and a half to plan, has between 50 to 100 guests, and costs somewhere in the ballpark of thirty-thousand dollars.  Will instead goes from a single felon to exonerated groom in a month, is expecting four people, and has spent the following increments respectively: $75 for the officiant, $2.50 for the marriage certificate, $43 to dry clean both his and Nigel’s suits, $60 on the boutonnieres because Will deserves to be a little indulgent, and a whopping $500 for the witness, the one thing in the entire operation that is traditionally free. 

Will would like to explain. 

Wedding arrangements are fairly transactional when you’re not inviting friends, family, or even countrymen when push comes to shove, with exactly 25% of the attending members being of foreign birth. Will schedules with Naomi, their obliging and surprisingly progressive gay-positive elderly officiant in a quick phone call. This is the first arrangement of importance.

The second arrangement is attire - Naomi’s only demand is suits. Will can do that. He has two of them, one for lecturing and one for funerals. When he pulls them out, the lecturing one is looking a little worse for wear, with at least two pulled strings in the arms. He can’t remember doing it, only that it’s likely that he wore it during one of his encephalitic blackouts, and god knows what he did during those. He dislikes the reminder. Funeral suit it is. 

Nigel, while a great fan of somewhat garish prints like his psychiatry-inclined twin of unknown gestational origin, has a very sensible black suit, the one he wears to meet Will in the airport on their first proper meeting. Will offers to buy him a different one so he doesn’t have to do without, but Nigel waves him off, saying that he likes the significance. “While a little more than a week doesn’t make for a very long history of romance, or that I’ve been hiding the damn thing in the closet for this exact moment, I like that it’s the same one as when we met.” Airport suit it is. 

The third, and least essential of arrangements, is a trip to the florist for boutonnieres - some trendy little hole-in-the-wall in Arlington that can accommodate a last minute request for hellebores. They don’t have the rich red ones, like Nigel carries from one continent to the next, but they do have white, and some red holly left, if that’s ok. ( _ A quick look online indicates holly means “defense and protection”, and good fucking lord, you are ok with that. You are ok with any sort of good luck charm at this point. _ ) Will picks these up with the suits at the dry cleaners, and pins them to the front of their suits before leaving the house in Wolf Trap while stress-eating his donuts. Nigel doesn’t say anything about it, but he does look at his own for a long time, carefully palming the refrigerator-crisp petals. He doesn't stress eat, but he does hum something like approval when taking a bite of one, rubbing glaze from his face. Will tries not to stare at it - the glaze, and the boutonniere. 

The last of these arrangements, and the more intimidating of which to accomplish, is establishing someone to be a witness. Will hardly knows anyone. Will has made it a point to not know anyone. When this obstacle presents itself initially, he toys with asking the gas station cashier to oversee this - maybe they can have the officiant meet them at her place of work, and they can say their vows adjacent to the slushie machine, porn magazines, and hot dog rollers that are starting to take on a distinct grey cast. “Nothing like using significant locations as the site of your wedding, or so the internet has told me!” Will would say, dressed to the nines, holding a new bottle of Wild Turkey in one hand, and a lotto ticket in the other, but even Nigel would probably be at least a tiny bit bothered by this. Will takes it upon himself to find at least one person that will...maybe not object to this whole affair.

Instead, today finds Will wearing his best funeral suit without a tie because Nigel tells him he looks like he’s getting ready to sell him a car, sitting in the parking lot of the Historic Fairfax Courthouse in Reston, staring at the cannons on either side of the Civil War monument in their center, tapping his fingers on the steering wheel nervously while Nigel leans all the way back in his seat, arms crossed behind his head. He watches as their officiant, Naomi, a rheumy-eyed older woman in a bright lilac tweed coat and skirt mills on the sidewalk, fiddles with her register book on the hood of her car, licking the pen tip to get it going as if that was still a problem of modern writing society. 

This is possibly how the witness of Will and Nigel’s marriage ends up being Jimmy Price, driving like a bat out of hell into the icy parking lot, 15 minutes late because Will doesn’t call Jimmy until three hours beforehand, offering him $500 to take an unexpected sick day and tell no one what he’s doing. Jimmy, as Will counts on as the resident happy-go-lucky, attends every office potluck, opens every Holiday card and coos over them, trusty person that he is, is absolutely delighted to sign the marriage certificate. Nigel, having only just heard about this legal requirement moments before arriving in the parking lot, just throws his head back and laughs softly while saying “shit” in varying tones, and palming his breast pocket for the Marlboros. His boutonniere is a bright and clean white next to the red of the carton. 

“Hey Will!” says Jimmy, waving in a bright blue sweater and white collared shirt. “Ran a little late on Route 50, hope I’m not holding the two of you up.”

Having sat idle for the last hour, Will shakes his head and summons a smile while stepping out of the car, Nigel snorting and sitting up. From the car next to them, Naomi shuffles in her snow boots, practical ugly things that clash with her purple tweed and sniffs away the cold from her nose. 

Jimmy, however, isn’t done until he abruptly is. “Jack came to work in such a mood today, and wait until you hear about what happened in Chilton’s interview today, it’s a mess, a literal mess I tell you, somebody should send the janitor for the interview rooms a gift basket and a spa coupon. At this point, a wedding is the least problematic thing I’ll be involved in all day, so I really have to thank you for-”

Nigel steps out of the car. 

“-letting me be involved, and...Doctor Lecter? What are you doing here?” 

Nigel, if he’s suspicious about the frequency of being referred to as Hannibal Lecter, shows nothing on his face, simply fiddling with the cigarette carton so it’s less obvious in his pocket. “Strike one,” he says. “But try again. Maybe this is a trained response, but I’m beginning to fucking enjoy watching people’s faces when I show up.” 

“Yeah, Hannibal tends to get that response,” Will deadpans. "Makes sense you would too."

Jimmy blinks a few times, and takes in the details. He’s a details guy, as most of the lab team is. Longer hair, wider shoulders, blunter nails and speech. His wrestling belt girl is barely visible today over the collar of his shirt and suit, holding her spoils just at the line of fabric and skin. The blown lines of it from healing over the years are stark and unmistakably real. 

“Will,” Jimmy says, low and accusatory. Will braces for the censure, and figuring out how to forge Jimmy’s signature. 

“Where did you find this guy?” he asks, squawking. “If I knew they had an entire line of lookalikes, I would have ordered one of my own years ago.” 

“Truly, you can buy everything on the internet,” Nigel teases. “Though who’s the original article is up to debate.” 

“Or up to birth certificates,” Will says without thinking. 

But Jimmy is delighted with the entire thing. He’s delighted that Will has a "boyfriend", and says as much. ( _"I had you pegged for asexual, which is to say not pegged, unless you're into that."_ ) He’s delighted that the Romanian economy supports Will and people like Will finding love in unlikely places. ( _"I don't think it's really supported, but ok," you say, not one to let an opportunity to say less go._ ) He’s especially delighted to hear that other than Jack, he’s the only one that knows, and that it would be appreciated if he could keep this to himself today. “People will talk,” Will explains, wielding his handful of twenty dollar bills to pay Jimmy in like a cudgel, “and Nigel really doesn’t deserve it, even if you think I do. We’re happy with the decision, and I’d rather Alana or...anyone else not try to dissuade me.” 

Will, not knowing Jimmy very well, but knowing he’s at least met the minimum requirements of FBI federal clearance, and not talking to Freddie Lounds, will respect this on some level. As Jimmy accepts the bribe money, Will assumes this to be a settled matter amongst men. 

It’s not a complicated process, with the preparations completed. It’s about two paragraphs worth of reciting vows, made sterile and nondenominational by municipal works. Paperwork. Social security numbers, and signing documents that set in motion Nigel’s ability to get his permanent resident documents. There’s no big band waiting for Will and Nigel when this is done with lots of congratulations and drinking. ( _ There is drinking waiting - you buy a very fine whiskey instead of your projected gas station purchase. You have to mark the occasion somehow. It’s important, even if it’s not to the judicial system. _ ) Naomi is quick, and Jimmy’s signature is surprisingly small and cramped for as boisterous as the rest of him is, and Will’s toes are going cold standing outside the closed courthouse in the safety of the front entry, clear of the icicles and black ice hardening as the sun sinks into evening shadow.

Nigel holds Will’s hand, turning his simple gold ring between his fingers, and is nothing but steadfast. He holds it tighter with each line recited, more secure in his position as the minutes pass. He leans into Will’s side, a long black-clad figure, and Will fights the desire to push back as much as to enjoy the warmth. It's silly to resist, but resisting is all Will really knows of affection. 

“By the powers vested in me by the state of Virginia and Fairfax County, I now pronounce you husband and husband,” the officiant nods, and the little notary stamp lands with a solid  _ thwack _ on the blue and pink of the marriage certificate. 

Will and Nigel sign. Nigel takes Will’s last name without a thought. “It’s easier,” he shrugs, because they never do actually discuss it, which is fine, because at least in regards to Will, Nigel has been nothing but easy. Will’s too shy to seal it with a kiss in front of co-workers and unknown old ladies, but Nigel makes that easy too, and takes his hand in the car after everyone disperses to leave one there, and when the house and the seven heads of the dogs appear in the frosted windows, he leaves one on the side of his mouth, and again on the side of Will’s neck, chasing shivers down past the funeral suit’s collar to shake in the core of Will’s chest. Their rings are warmed from their hands and by each others hands, and Will, in spite of himself, is content. 

\---

Jimmy Price, perennial chatter-mouth and habitual talker, has always quite enjoyed being invited to be involved. 

He and his twin are neither one inclined to sports growing up, or even particularly good academics outside of their preferred interests, but they come from a large and boisterous family. They take their amusements in glibly talking to each other, and soon after, other people at separate universities. It sets people at ease, not having to fill empty space with words, and Jimmy has so many of them to share. 

Jimmy Price is never made to feel lonely, even as a consummate bachelor and aging professional in his own field. He enjoys lively debate and theatre. He accepts every party invite. He takes every call. He lives for mutual discourse on cloning organs, having long joked that having an identical twin has its perks, but not sacrificing his kin to have access to a nice set of kidneys would be preferable. ( _ Highly specific, but highly specific is beneficial to the job filled by Jimmy, and no one does more than laugh or roll their eyes if it’s the second-third-fourth time hearing it. _ ) Nothing that he isn’t contractually required to keep his silence on is taboo. Jobs, politics, sexual preferences, food, sexual preferences according to your food preferences, food with sex, you name it. Privacy is neither a prerogative nor thought of. 

Jimmy, not knowing Will very well, does his best to comply with Will’s request to his understanding of what Will is asking for. He doesn’t tell a soul all day, or into the next, and for most of the day following that. Will, after all, never said “tell no one ever, or by God or the intrinsic evil of the Universe, I will kill you and put you on a deer head”, the way Jimmy might have supposed he would just months ago. He just wanted to be left alone for his wedding day, which makes sense in every way. 

He’s paged mid-afternoon amidst watching  _ North by Northwest _ , and Jimmy arrives at work promptly on Sunday evening, where he is called to examine the crime scene in a horse barn and sample for fibers and other materials that are of non-horse origin. He has been in excellent humor following the marriage license signing, taking himself out for a drink, renting a number of mistaken identity films to stream in celebration of the day, and in an absolute rush to get to work as soon as possible to talk to Brian, the subject of almost all his diatribes in modern recall, twin long since moved out of state. The extent to which Brian enjoys this is in question, but as he does nothing to stop it, Jimmy thus does nothing to either.

Allegedly, a woman has been sewn into one of the mares like a dead foal. Jimmy thinks that’s fabulously interesting in the same way watching a pride of lions savage a wildebeest is. A number of police officers are green faced, while stable hands look very forlorn between stalls, calming their animals, but Jimmy is practically chipper, snapping on his protective gear with enthusiasm. 

( _ Forensics majors, honestly. _ ) 

Jack is standing next to Doctor Lecter who is looking very lean in his tweed coat and blue latex gloves, perhaps fascinated as Jimmy is by this particular modus operandi if his sharp eyes say anything. Jack, not fascinated at all, gives Jimmy an absolutely withering look from behind the glare of the heat lamps. “Feeling better?” he asks. 

“Oh wonderful,” Jimmy replies. “Always good to reset after a bad turn of the stomach. Besides, I lose my sick days if I don’t use them.”

Stretching his neck, back, forward, and side to side, Jack could probably stand to use a few sick days of his own again. Clearly the last round didn’t work. 

“Looking at something beautiful after something ugly is a favorite pastime of my own,” says Doctor Lecter, surveying the wreckage beneath them. Jimmy appreciates Doctor Lecter’s observance, almost as much as Will’s - he examines the way that one examines an instrument, turning things in hand, considering features with careful fingers and measured patience. He lacks Will’s poetry of sight, preferring to keep his thoughts to himself until they are ready to be freed, but they are always articulated well. There’s an unhappy twist to his mouth today, barely visible, but made more obvious in the gestalt of the yellow lamps, as though he has been frowning. “When one can’t find beauty readily available, you must seek it out.”

“ _ This _ ,” Jack says with a gesturing hand, “is not what I particularly like to look at after watching one of my previous consultant’s get arrested for murder and mayhem and summarily have half his face blown out.” 

At this, Jimmy brightens. “Speaking of consultants,” he says. “Boy, do I have a hot scoop for you. Jack, you might know something about this one.” 

Jack does.

Doctor Lecter doesn’t, if the polite curiosity he displays at first says anything. His face slowly transforms word by word, going from placid to ominous - Jimmy can sympathize. There’s nothing quite as aggravating as being the last person to know something. As Jimmy talks about his trip to Reston, Doctor Lecter’s mouth goes stiffer and stiffer and stiffer, until he’s less a person and more a statue, staring without sight into the image of the horse’s entrails and woman lying prone beneath, fascination gone. 

“How...unexpected,” says Doctor Lecter, because every cutting line of his shoulders, fingers, mouth, and eyes say he must say something, as tectonic plates must shift under their own force. 


	7. a face written in the sides of churches

Sometimes, though not often before today, Nigel wonders if he would adapt better to the idea of being one of at least two people with the same face if he had been introduced to the concept in his youth. Like a twin, but living a separate life. Not so weird, he would think, nodding in unison with a perfect other. Better for confusing people. Better for playing in the park with the rest of the kids, a guaranteed party of two. 

Nigel also wonders if he wouldn’t have had some severe doubts about God secretly getting bored with his creation to the point of using the same builds over and over again in lieu of a new design, as though he had landed on a best-selling version of a solid, repeatable schematic. ( _While flattering, you like to think you are at least a little more unique than a human equivalent to Air Jordans, or a McDonalds hamburger. You are nonetheless, as you noted, still flattered._ ) 

Instead, he gets to tangle with this thought as an adult in the parking lot of the local Shell petrol station, staring flabbergasted through the windshield, while his new husband pays for fuel inside on a Monday evening and grabs his vice of choice from the cold case - more of the Turkey spirits, and a newspaper he’ll use as a shield in the morning rather than actually read. Something about keeping up with the local weirdos - Nigel doesn’t ask, although with how the last four days have been going, maybe he should. 

Nigel can’t say he was prepared for the eventuality of this, even if he’s had some warning. Not really covered in the average finishing school, that. No curriculum developed for the average man to contemplate his role in creation, and if he is but one instance of several. 

Nigel very nearly gets out of the car and strides across the pavement to confirm this isn’t some kind of gag, or optical illusion. He can’t discount it - he’s taken a lot of drugs in his life, and isn’t willing to discount the possibility. Maybe slap the guy around to see if it’s a mask, and say his mother’s a whore if it isn’t, because obviously it must be Nigel’s mother that’s the cause of this, as he’s been trying to prove for years. Instinct tells him not to, because hey, still not a permanent citizen until all the paperwork is filed and the shiny ID shows up, but he’s got the itch in his fingers to do it, chewing the corner of a winter-dry lip to curb the urge. 

He is relieved to note that a similar existential crisis appears to be happening at the adjacent pump, at the side of a far nicer car than Nigel has ever owned. Not comically so, but there’s a certain loose-jawed awe that is unmistakable as anything other than utter shock, and Nigel’s very accustomed to how it looks on his own mug. Apparently somebody was even less prepared for this possibility than him, who has himself been bracing for this with each introduction Nigel has made to Will’s limited social circle.

Very limited indeed.

_Ah_ , he thinks to himself, _this must be Hannibal Lecter._

A lot happens to get to this particular crisis of identity. A man doesn’t simply arrive on the doorstep of inevitability and existential dilemmas without a little disaster to get him there. Mondays really do serve up a lot of bullshit, even for a man with no job and no school to account for, and a social circle of exactly one man and seven dogs.

\--- 

Arguably, the whole mess begins at birth. Ten fingers, ten toes, and the blueprint for what Nigel has always considered _his_ face. ( _Eleven fingers is where the differences start at this level, but you don’t know that yet. You don’t know if anyone would know had there not been a need to catalogue it._ ) Birth certificates are issued, names assigned, and the concept of Nigel as a person gains it’s first slow momentum.

Having a sense of personhood is, fortunately, not a requirement of early childhood. No quandaries of purpose at the Kindergarten level, or so one hopes. Basics like speech, and fine motor skills occupy the bulk of the years following birth. Observation, mimicry, and social mores follow. Testing the flexibility of those mores comes shortly after. Shoelaces must be tied. Prized family possessions destroyed. Sure, nature exerts influence, and the parts of people that are really part of their parents start surfacing like a crop of colorful mushrooms that could very well be poisonous, but that’s not personhood - that’s reflection, and biology, and hardly someone’s own to worry about. 

It’s only around the age of 8 that Nigel Paraschiv’s identity as a person instead of a child begins to properly form. It also, incidentally, begins on a Monday.

( _Unbeknownst to you, Hannibal Lecter’s identity is forming now as well, as though God sat his finger on the surface of the earth, saw the shape of your shared face, and said “I can make this_ **_much_ ** _worse, and not only can, but will. Fun times, am I right, my children? Amen.” Hannibal’s fate is immediate, terrible, and transformative as an earthquake, while yours burns slow and pushes peaks from the stone of your being. That’s ok - you’ve always liked to find things to climb. In the future, you will look forward to a little compare and contrast, as though this has all been an intentional experiment of character building, rather than the unkindness of unkind times happening on its own._ ) 

The time of his individuality developing has widely been considered by family members to be a difficult time for his parents. Mondays, because both of them work late, and the time of developing personhood because Nigel is about to become...well, Nigel.

Nigel isn’t an unpleasant child even if he’s sometimes an unpleasant adult, and something of a strong-minded boy, but Nigel is full of aspirations, and those are difficult when your parents and your country are what they are. He wants to sail the ocean. He wants to go see the snow in the Carpathians in the winter. He wants to visit the capital and have a grand house as a man. He wants to fall in love. He wants to summit Mt. Elbrus, the greatest mountain in the continent of Europe, and look down at it from a great height. 

( _And you will - from a plane instead of a mountain, crossing the ocean, wet-handed from flowers in your grip, and you, praying for them to keep their heads up despite the circumstances. You wanted to be a mountaineer, and a gentleman, and a man of means, and maybe that’s still possible on another continent, where you can leave your history behind from cradle to the first night back to your flat as a single man once more._ ) 

None of this sounds particularly aspirational per se from the modern lens, but it is when the whole is considered. It’s the 1980s, and Romania is still under the failing communist rule of Nicolae Ceaușescu, unhappy, and in places starving. ( _“Austerity measures,” your father grumbles, and eats his wilting cabbage rolls so that nothing is missed._ ) His parents are making due as they can, and Nigel doesn’t know what better looks like yet, only that he has ideas. No extra money for joy rides, or trips away from Ploiești’s smokestacks, sleepy city core, and suburban sprawl for the excitement of a new place. As far as that goes, it’s difficult for everyone, and in a few unfortunate years, will get worse. 

Aspirations are not useful - you can’t eat aspiration. You can’t burn them as fuel instead of methanol, already inferior and smoking down the roadways. Aspirations don’t make productive workers, and abandoned aspirations fester as resentment. Better to not have them right now. 

Luckily, eight year olds don’t understand productivity, or the potential of lifelong resentments, or that parents and grandparents are anything but crusaders against the concept of fun. They also don’t really understand nuance, which is unfortunate in most cases, but allows a tenacious spark in Nigel to burn him into the shape of the person he becomes. Nigel, in any shape, doesn’t believe in abandonment. 

He is still in primary school at this time, a plucky yellow and white building that he walks to from the edges of Ploiești, and today the teacher is in the depths of a lesson on family names. Some are better than others, if nationalist propaganda of the time is to be believed. Preferred suffixes, preferred origins, preferred families when it honestly comes down to it. Nigel Paraschiv, not fitting into the typical mold of a “proper” Romanian surname, and already unusual as far as first names go, doesn’t have the greatest time during this segment. Having none of the background of a proper etymological education in language, alongside the teacher who has simply been given material to read off, Nigel simply does what he is typically trusted to respond with even as a kid - call it a bunch of goat shit, and say his name is way better than everyone else’s. 

  
He also receives a fairly typical response to this - a sound ass beating by the principal, and a firmly written letter for his parents. 

Ah well, just another Monday, really. 

His mother, not yet a bitch by his estimation at this age, still young enough to not be disappointed in her son and too tired to do much about it even if she was, shakes her head and hangs her coat at the front door. She has had a long day, and can’t keep the irritation out of her face as she plates food after nearly an hour’s worth of banging around the kitchen. “Paraschiv is a good name,” she says tersely in agreement at the dinner table, “but it’s religious. We’re named for a saint, and saints don’t do much good for the state, even if they do for God.”

This too is a load of high-handed goat shit and sounds stupid, but Nigel’s not brave enough to say as much to his mother directly at this age. She instead offers to show him their namesake’s face, which is less stupid, though it does mean going to church, which again makes a trip down goat shit lane. 

( _Your father swears exorbitantly, but you never hear complaints about it until you start to as well. Your mother has the audacity to ask where you get it from, as though you’ve gone out of your way to personally make her life more difficult. That’s not true, but it is a bonus you discover with each year you get older._ ) 

Parascheva of the Balkans, Sfânta Vineri, Saint Friday - whatever her name is this particular morning, has a very serious face if the front of the Basilica in the east side of the city core. Parascheva. Paraschiv. Yes, he supposes that makes sense. 

Gilt, silver handed, blue robed, and by his mother’s account, a proclaimed zealot for leaving home to live in countless other cities after feeling the call of God and starting to speak in tongues. ( _“So she’s crazy,” you say, pulling at your tucked shirt. “She’s_ **_not_ ** _,” asserts your mother and you just put fists to your hips and stare again at the mural._ ) 

“She ran away from home and lived in the city as a saint?” asks Nigel, having entertained this idea many times growing up, in the way that children figure walking to the next city over is really just a prolonged walk from the school rather than an actual effort. With his ass still smarting from the _additional_ spanking he receives from his father following the letter from the teacher on Monday, Nigel is considering it himself. 

Nigel’s mother, in her Sunday best, and thinking this is not the best thread of thought for her above all else aspirational son, tells him “I don’t think that’s why she was sainted” with the rushed tone of someone sensing a misunderstanding in progress, but Nigel in addition to being aspirational has a real talent for hearing what he wants to hear, and conveniently misses the asceticism and the giving up of earthly goods, and chooses to be selectively deaf about that until he is much older. Role models shouldn’t have pitfalls, after all. 

Higher purpose in bigger places. Cities to see, humble roots to abandon. Nigel respects her origin story immensely - he’s confident he’s on a similar path, holy or otherwise. He just wishes he didn’t have to go to a Divine Liturgy to hear it. 

People pass in and out of the church, not even considering her watching above them, heavy on the doors of the building. They don’t consider Nigel either. Nigel gets pulled to the wayside to stare out of the footfall of the crowd, and just frowns as his mother recounts her canonization. 

  
  


Nigel looks at the mural of her again, looming from the whiteness of the building, and thinks it’s much cooler than being named after a profession, or a forefather, or something especially uninteresting like the color white. Not a proper Romanian name indeed, he snorts. 

Friday’s son, he tells the other kids at school when the first opportunity comes to correct their misunderstanding - he’s more than just Romanian, he’s a goddamn institution, and is looking forward to his own calling to the city someday. His aspirations grow teeth. 

Friday’s son, his parents say with an eyeroll when he learns to live for the weekends, when he gets harder to get a hold of, when he starts evading the idea of working in one of the factories, or the refineries, or the idea of having parents at all. While the coming political change would push him into unkinder work, he relishes the ability to choose it. ( _And you do - choose it. Choose guns, and contraband, and crossing the borders of Serbia and Moldova, bringing destruction to other people with a young man’s jaunty smile. You get to see the mountains. You get to see the sea. You get to move to the city, and watch the street children turn into little lords the way you turn yourself into one, as long as they can do the right task, sell the right thing._ ) He sheds the appearance of the lower income family son, and his parents who warn him not to. Nigel has fortunes to seek. He sharpens his words. He has heard in his heart that he will be bigger than factory work. This is a religious calling, of a kind. A new city every week as Romania evolves from the ashes of revolution and the speculation of the West. 

Friday’s son, says Nigel as an adult, living richly on the weekends, staying up late, always just a workweek away from his pleasures. Over a decade into the 21st century, disreputable, cash wealthy and credit poor, but undoubtedly a fully-formed person. He learns to love music. He speaks three languages and a fourth roughly out of business prudence, and has many fairweather friends. But Nigel loves himself, and the few people that stay close to him, and he holds them close with the one understanding: Friday’s son has aspirations, and you can share them with him, or you can fuck off. 

\---

( _Unless you love them. They don’t get to go anywhere if you love them. For all that you call her a bitch, you know exactly where your mother is, and your father before he passed in the Revolution - perhaps more aspiration in his heart than he dared tell you. For all that Gabi leaves you behind for some stupid American fuck, you know where she is. For all that Darko will go from comrade in arms and arms dealing to a tricky, unreliable partner, you know where he wants you, and you forgive him it._ ) 

( _When you land your eyes on Will for the first time in the airport, you now know where he is too._ ) 

\--- 

If he’s being entirely truthful, and Nigel prefers this but has no issue with flirting with the edges of it, marrying some bloke overseas was never in his cards. What’s more is he’d happily beat the absolute shit out of the person who suggested it. 

Less than a year ago he was happily married, if occasionally separated for everyone’s tempers to cool down. Mostly his. Sometimes Gabi’s. He remembers she was in a production of Peer Gynt when they separated for the last time, sheet music still scattered across his flat. She was magnificent when the performance came, even if he listened from the dark of the back of the room as not to upset her. He comes again to listen to her at the Athenaeum where it all truly falls apart a few months later. He assists in a murder. He covers it up. He covers it up badly, and she finds some pencil-necked idiot who talks gently, and digs around where he’s not wanted, and Nigel’s supposed to just _accept that_. 

Less than a year ago, he didn’t think he would be evading arrest, abandoned, contemplating suicide instead of the reality that his wife loves another man, and such a _poor_ excuse for one. 

He had the option to exit of course, and go the real saintly route - be a proper Friday’s son, abandoning the life he knows for the glory of something else. The police were _right there_. He could run forward and not have to think about it again. Raise the gun the right way, be perceived as a threat, and be done with the whole affair. He wanted her to feel bad about it, as though it was her fault instead of his, and what better way than death, the city of devils becoming the next place to hide in from your last life, beyond the cares of a hardscrabble life?

( _The urge passes - fortunately fast. You have too much you want to do. You’ll find someone that can love you the way that you love. You roll away, unknown to yourself, and your wife who submits an uncontested petition for the dissolution of your marriage a week later, and don’t look back other than to chase the city lights with your eyes from the window of the apartment. She saved your life once - you can respect that by not taking hers, even if everything in you rebels against this abandonment._ ) 

But needs drive, and needs, in this year of Our Lord and the Lady Good Friday, demand an expedient exit from the country before he can piss off any more of his business partners, or film any more inopportune snuff videos, or attempt to suffocate tourists with convenient bread bags, which abruptly end his tenure in Bucharest as a free man. There are few left to speak with - Darko is hiding, and their mutual acquaintances shy away from engaging either. He’ll have to start over. 

Ukraine? Macedonia? Greece? 

He’s tired. He’s lonely. All this being the bigger person is tiring work. 

It’s one of the dancers from the club that makes the suggestion - an older, wiser gal who goes by “Dulcegării”, who treats Nigel nice because he sees her out to her bus stop on late nights, and makes him laugh: “Have you considered a wealthy husband or wife?” she says, sliding into a tidy split, stretching. “Marry an American. Be sweet to someone lonely. My sister did, and she lives in Illinois, but she lives a good life. Visas are cheap - what’s three years for that kind of mobility and privilege?” 

Nigel grins, and sets her on her way, but does his due diligence. When the due diligence is done, he weighs his pros and cons. Marry an old broad in the middle of nowhere? Statistically unlikely. Marry an old bastard in the same neighborhood that she’s in? Well, that’s more probable, if the reviews are anything to go by. Nigel’s a prideful son of a different time - he doesn’t know the taste of subjugation after so long living without the law. The idea of being under someone’s thumb for however long it takes to switch citizenship is more of a challenge than the old dancing broad thinks, old bastard with a corn field or not.

He makes an account anyway. One should always hedge their bets. Nigel’s got the cash, but he also got the wild desire for fate to take the reins - show him where to go. Give him a place for aspirations to take root again. 

_What do you like?_ asks the website profile. 

Nigel considers that, from the blandness of his flat above the shop, where even now at 3 am he can hear them readying for the day - the clang of kitchen pans, heating a stove, putting utensils and glasses to rights. They make croissants on Tuesdays. Nigel thinks they don’t make particularly good ones, melting the butter out until it burns, but so it goes. 

_Cocaine, if we’re being honest_ , he writes, like that’s anything close to the actual answer, but he supposes with a laugh that it is true. He taps a finger against the round table, nearest to the window. The sun won’t be up for four more hours. He’ll go to sleep in two. 

It’s not wrong, he thinks with a yawn. Nigel likes cocaine, and honesty, and fucking on occasion. Nice things for himself. Not frivolous ones, albeit there’s a lot of things that he doesn’t consider frivolous that any other person probably does, and the cocaine is undoubtedly not the most practical of expenditures, but things that belong to him, and are consistent about belonging to him.

( _Wives, as you discover, despite the description on the package and everything you’ve been told as a once upstanding young man that you should want, are_ **_not_ ** _always. You would have returned her if you could, like a bike with the wrong shaped frame and the two of you merely didn’t fit together, but you grew accustomed to needing her, and you don’t get the opportunity to reconsider before she’s stolen regardless, and now she’s not yours. “Nigel was my husband,” says Gabi, and your heart sinks, even as your mouth opens to correct and continue. That’s a revelation, that she could think otherwise, even if there’s a chance it was your fault. That’s something you don’t like - you don’t like admitting fault._ ) 

He frowns. He lights a cigarette. He types, _marriages should be honest, right?_ _Hope you like honesty too_. 

_What’s an email we can reach you at?_ asks the form, and Nigel, without giving it another thought, types in [ **_fridaysson@posta.ro_ ** ](mailto:fridaysson@posta.ro). 

That he’s gotten here is an embarrassment. He doesn’t like that either. He hopes for the best. People always want to know what he wants, and that’s it, really. Makes no sense how they keep getting mad about it. Maybe they just don’t know how to recognize what the best looks like in him.

\---

**_Will of Virginia, USA_ ** is obviously sad, and obviously a man, no matter his pretty shaven and tired face. Nigel can’t fault him for it - he asked from the get-go if the line was drawn at dicks. That he asks specifically is what makes Nigel consider him after all. 

Forlorn and male is not Nigel’s traditional type, even if said forlorn male does have dogs, financial means, and large swaths of property, which is the most medieval thing he’s personally considered, even as a person who’s lived through a regime change, carved a few fingers off hands, and probably can be held partially accountable for the country’s dependency on hard drugs within the capital through an eastern trade route. ( _You deserve some kind of distinguishment - medals of honor for pioneering western vices in the frontier of capitalism, and good old country tradition of guns with big stocks. Very inspirational of you and Darko, taking the reins on this kind of urban renaissance. You can make a proper major city of your chosen hometown yet. What’s a major metro without severe addiction problems and a little violence anyway?_ ) But Will Graham is hard to forget. 

Will Graham frowns when he wants to smile, and smiles when he can’t help but do it, like the admission pains him. _This is what I find funny_ , his chuckles say, _please don’t give me a hard time about it. I know it’s shit_. 

He listens to Nigel, and gently pokes at the edges of the issues, aware that there’s an issue to begin with, but hesitant to put the wrong foot forward. 

He squints into the blue light of the laptop. 

He sips too loudly at his coffee. 

He has very blue eyes, even from thousands of miles away in the dead digital light of a laptop, the blue of a saint’s mantle, painted to inspire piety, veiling the entrance to God’s house. 

Nigel, too smart for another pair of blue eyes, or another matronly saint of poor decision making, dares to hope that he’ll get to look at them again. Perhaps he has a type, regardless of gender - that’s reassuring. ( _Lapis blue, once the rarest of pigments, brought through the Black Sea._ ) When he does get a second chance, he dares to hope he’ll get to see them as many times as it makes him happy to do so. 

In fairness to the reality of Will Graham, as outlined by **_SecretOperation.Ro/mance_ ** and their very concerned connections team, which is unfair in that they’re not at all concerned about Nigel, someone who’s been up to no good since he turned fourteen: 

Will Graham is a felon. He has escaped police custody at least once, and has only very recently been let off from multiple charges of murder, mayhem, and desecration. Kinky. A quick search online shows him to be in his mid-thirties, a known associate of the FBI, and generally a figure of some skepticism amongst his colleagues. 

“Smart,” comes the frequent observation. “But deeply unpleasant,” comes another. “If he didn’t kill people this time, he probably will on the next go-around,” comes the least unkind of them, which...doesn’t really match with the shy younger man that asks Nigel if he wants to find out if he’s a fat old man somewhere in the midwest of the United States, waiting for his one true love to farm corn with, just as Nigel dreaded. 

Nigel wouldn’t necessarily describe himself as a good judge of character, but he is a good judge of what hurts him and what doesn’t these days. Will Graham is probably checkered as Nigel is, but Will Graham doesn’t want to hurt him, and arguably just very sincerely doesn’t want to be hurt ( _again_ ) himself. Nigel can work with that - Nigel can build basilicas to that. Nigel can write the liturgies that match that prayer, one that he thinks is written on his own rotten heart. 

“You made the most sense in a lineup of people because you reminded me of someone that I thought I wanted that...wasn’t ever honest,” he tells Nigel, with the gallows face of a young person burned for the first time. “I know you’re not the same person, and that’s shallow, but there it is.”

Nigel smiles. 

“There’s the kind of answer I can trust,” he says in turn, and thinks that maybe this won’t be so bad. Similarity means attraction. Willingness to speak the truth means a foundation for something more durable than the hot and cold romance of two people who love each other’s intensity, but not their day-to-day realities. All or nothing, Nigel says, and Will Graham rises to answer that. 

\---

One of the greatest lies Nigel manages to perpetuate to Will Graham is that he is a low-maintenance animal - easy to feed, minimal brushing, a great addition to a large pack of dogs by merit of his willingness to bite intruders, but also his willingness to be led around by a soft hand. Comes with all the accessories. Is house-broken. Please ignore the need to leave the country of Romania as if it was on fire. Dog promises to be well-behaved in the absence of reliable and known contraband routes, and will avoid taking personal calls from the Balkans from everyone, mother included. 

Mother especially included.

Will accepts this at face value, and somewhat adorably apologizes at every step for his minimal lifestyle. A person living the life of Parascheva properly, not just the parts he likes best. Friday’s actual son, with his ragtag band of followers in the form of the pack. 

Nigel falls in with them as best he can - he didn’t lie about loving dogs, and the dogs, like him, are hungry for any affection he cares to show, save perhaps Winston. Winston is independent. Winston loves Will, and no one else. Winston accepts Nigel, and stand vigil on the porch with him, and Nigel tries to give that the respect that it deserves, man to man as it were. He scratches the dog’s ears, doesn’t fuss about the long red hairs, and is careful for his regard. 

( _Not unlike Will._ ) 

\---

One wouldn’t think it at first glance that Nigel cares about much of anything, much less nice things. His cigarettes come from the corner market - St George Blues, still in their cyrillic cellophane wrap - but now Marlboro Reds from the gas station. He drinks coffee from the closest cafe instead of the nicest one - now the coffee maker on the kitchen counter. He slouches. He doesn’t iron his outfits, and he won’t start today, and Will might actually kill him if he assumes that Will wants the task. He doesn’t drink top shelf liquor, and shit, he doesn’t _remember_ most of what he _does_ drink. He has inexpensive favorites across multiple categories that he refuses to be shamed for, because he’s tried his hand at snobbery, and found the enjoyment unequal to what he knows he likes already. 

He answers on the fourth ring, and not at all if he’s in a conversation - if you hang up before then, that’s **your** problem. He gets into fist fights because he has a temper. He gets into fist fights because he can pretend that his temper is high even when it’s not, and he simply wants to fight. He doesn’t fight much after Gabi leaves - nothing to fight about. He doesn’t fight at all at Will’s house. Will could probably hold his own, but all Nigel really wants to do is take his narrow fingers in hand and keep them safe. So much about Will feels fragile, belied by the hard records of breaking his own thumbs to escape the police.

A waste, he’s thought over many a glass of overpriced vodka, wishing it was the gut burner he gets through his teenage years with. Desperate, he’s thought watching men throw their cash at the club floor, like any of these illusory dancers gives half a shit about them and their neon-bright bills of _lei_ , even if those men could afford it. ( _They can’t - that’s ok as long as they were spending with your clubs, and your guns, and your dancers, with Darko and your associates stalking about in the mezzanine of the room, letting you do what you do best._ ) 

This is who he is, he’s told family, friends, and his wife for those years that he had one before she disappears. Nigel feels like he’s been explicitly clear. This is what he’ll constantly be.

But the exceptions...Well, Nigel has them. 

Clothes are acceptable, and never let it be said that he isn’t open to a little bit of absurdity in them. ( _The scratch of polyester, wrinkled linen, and hand-me-down wool is hard to forget - school uniforms, church clothes, cold winters, all utilitarian and cheap. Absurdity is in scarce supply when you are young, but then again, maybe not. Maybe all the adults around you are absurd between poverty and revolution, and you need it in your clothes now because you don’t know anything without it, and this seems safer. Here’s a stupid dog print, please don’t ask about PTSD, or how you feel about the dissolution of the East Bloc._ ) Now is a time of _haves_ instead of _have nots_ , and fuck anyone who thinks that’s something to be ashamed of. He’ll be buried in a velvet blazer, a Beatles shirt, and Valentino loafers if he wants, and he does, except the getting buried part. Fuck anyone that thinks that’s coming soon. He’s going to live forever, if only to spite the woman who left him, and all his detractors. 

He tries to replace the clothes slowly in front of Will, filling hangers upstairs, and tidy wooden drawers downstairs next to the bed - he doesn’t want to explain how he has money, and from what, but Will makes a face that suggests he feels bad he hasn’t _provided_ for Nigel, and Nigel finds he hates it when Will mopes around the first floor of the farmhouse, swarmed by canines that want to make him feel better. Nigel included. 

( _You guess it’s good that you’re in company of a similar mindset?_ )

Cars are acceptable, though he hasn’t often needed one. With the original half-hearted hope of moving abroad, he needed one less than ever before. Maybe when he gets to where he’s going, he comforted himself. He’ll need a way to get away from that. Always on to the next city, the next shape that he can take. Now that he’s here, Nigel is content to sit with Will, but with all these people starting to introduce themselves to their ecosystem, perhaps it would be wise to evaluate if he should be more capable of escaping even less savory company than dorky office types stumbling into the bathroom covered in blood, or one of the most impressively barrel-chested federal agents he’s ever seen. 

Guns especially should be high-quality, reliable, and well-made. Nigel has...had several. Hard to sell your product when you’re not willing to consume a bit of it yourself, and lifestyle basics are never a waste of money. It frustrates him to have to leave them behind, forgotten under some mattress to be discovered by the landlord, or an investigative team that will likely be too late to connect the dots of where he’s been living, but travel is a province of the mobile, and his favorites, the uzi, and the AK-74, and the Pistol Mitralieră create questions not easily answered with his conspicuously unmarked passport, and certainly not acceptable by the average airline. 

“Sorry about the exotic guns,” he could have said at customs. “This is my first time coming through the usual channels. Got rather used to crossing country lines by highland passes. Should there be paperwork?” he would ask as someone wisely called the security on him. 

Getting to the States changes a few things for him. Chiefly is that for at least a few days, he is dependent on a duffel bag of a few things. He hasn’t been this dressed down since his days as a teenager, wading the Danube with things he shouldn’t have. As an adult, it’s like leaving the house without underwear as a person accustomed to the support, and totally on accident - perfectly manageable, capable of waving like it’s any given day of the week, but uncomfortable. Low hanging. 

Another thing is his sense of restlessness. It’s gone, vanished with the whiteness of the Virginia snow, and Nigel almost finds some additional restlessness on principle as a man with the itchiest feet of anyone he knows. Will’s life, as it is now it whatever kind of pseudo leave-of-absence he’s on, is slow and well-lived, and has no insecurities about three pots of weak coffee in the morning, or answering emails at noon, or eating takeout everyday because there’s some sort of game of chicken being performed about who gets to be responsible for the traditionally homemaking skills - not as a strange sexist nod, but because neither man is familiar with caring for another human being, and no one knows how to go first. 

( _You eventually break first - a laundry load that may as well include more clothes, and it’s not like you weren’t doing it anyway, so you ask Will if he has anything he needs done. In turn, Will makes a passing attempt at pasta carbonara from boxed fettuccine, and the spell is broken, though there’s no reason to not trust outside forces with the food if this is the standard fare, and Will agrees with one of those pained laughs of his, and you think to bite the edge of his ear as a tease, to favor his ears with gentle fingers, waiting on his regard._ ) 

It’s not a perfect solution - Will seems to still be skittish to the presence of another person, or at the very least the presence of another man, and whatever resemblance he holds to his predecessor is a dread that occasionally passes over Will’s face. Nigel promises himself to replace that image. He has a very strong sense of who he is, no matter outside influence. 

There’s no room for people other than himself in Will’s considerations. They’ve contractually arranged their lives around that, and Nigel knows contracts, even if he doesn’t entirely know Will, or what he’s doing, or why everyone is gradually and inexplicably opposed to him in Will’s life, like they know who he is, and where he’s from, and the doubt of his veracity, a true born son of Romania with his strange first name, and the name of a canon saint for a family one.

\---

Nigel never expects to _lose_ his last name. 

He’s grown proud of it. He’s learned to sign it in a sharp flourish. He never hesitates to correct someone who spells it wrong, or says it strangely. 

So the casualness with which he signs it away, to replace it on every piece of paper that has represented him from birth to this moment, comes as a surprise, if a very quiet one. 

“It’s easier,” he tells Will, because Will has that anxious look he gets whenever he suspects that he’s overstepping, or that he hasn’t considered something enough. To that point, the thoroughness with which Nigel’s new husband wants to consider every angle of a problem is as endearing as it is obnoxious at times. Nigel is confident that God him-fucking-self has not considered the vastness of creation with the level of detail that Will gives things like asking Nigel to let the dogs out, or if Nigel is ok with Chinese takeout, or if Nigel wants to go to Arlington or into DC to pick up some things, or if Nigel is ok with Will himself and all these other things are just variants on a theme with highly specific outlets for his restless energy. 

Honestly, if Will would just let Nigel get him off, Will might understand that Nigel is ok with most things Will does, all the way to ditching the most iconic aspect of his identity growing up.

( _This, you think, would make both of you more comfortable. You’re not an old hand at cocksucking, and you’d either maim or kill someone before suggesting as much in the time before coming here. Romania is not progressive. Romania, for all that it is improving, is the product of its very messy upbringing in the 20th century, and stalwart Orthodox roots. But feelings change alongside lovers and regimes, and apparently your willingness to cock-suck, if that’s the right way to phrase it._ ) 

He’s tried the age-old method of liquoring him up. He’s tried being helpful and compliant, and this gets him closer to Will in bed, but not quite _in bed with him_ , though it’s certainly an improvement. He’s tried sharing, and this has netted him a few kisses for the very cheap cost of a few cigarettes. 

Married people share. Nigel’s accustomed to being married - it’s something between satisfying and reassuring to be able to teach Will that he can still do that particular trick, even if the person who taught him turned out to be really shit at it. 

Sharing a name is natural. It’s hardly even a hesitation when the elderly clerk hands him a register to sign, and make his declarations. Nigel signs ‘Paraschiv’ away, and says a fond farewell to it. The good Saint Friday’s son can learn to live as ‘Graham’, the grey home, the shades of a little cottage in the Virginia countryside, with a blue-eyed beauty that Nigel unaccountably loves with the first wry twist of his mouth, a person in need of someone to to cherish them, and Nigel, with hooks for fingers and bites for smiles, tries to ensure Will Graham will stay his, the way he has learned is not always guaranteed. 

But Christ in Heaven with His Fucking Divine Mother, Nigel sincerely hopes the sanctity of marital vows or some shit is the key to this finally getting around this chaste dance they’re doing someday, because he doesn’t know what else to do other than wait. He wants instead to rip the bandaid off, remove the doubts, make this whole bizarre thing into something that Nigel understands, or can learn to understand. He knows skin. He knows passion. He doesn’t really know men, but how different could they possibly be? 

Nigel twists the gold band on his finger, snugger than the one he wore before, and relishes the uncomfortable pinch of the skin there. Patient. Humble. Respectful. This is what a married man should be, and he’s not going to be the one to fail this time, goddamn it. 

\---

It turns out that it works, somewhat. 

Pulling into the driveway in the quiet of the Friday evening, the front yard and house gone orange-gold in the sun going down at the driveway’s edge, Will doesn’t hesitate to sigh at the feeling of Nigel’s affections. Nigel presses lips to the thin column of neck that rises from the practical black suit of Will’s wedding attire. He can feel the heartbeat beneath against his mouth, and rather than afraid, it beats smooth and relaxed. Nigel of course commends himself - smoothly done, Nigel. You’ve still got it, newly single and recently suicidal or not. It’s a relief to know he can still be desirable. 

( _Will’s accidental fixation on your chest the day before should count towards this as well. You feel more masculine and in control in that moment than you do in dozens and dozens of business deals past, even if you do occasionally think you have more_ **_physically_ ** _in common with the dogs than with Will in this regard._ ) 

Successful thus far, Nigel allows himself the luxury of experimentation. He worries the soft skin at the join of Will’s jaw to his ear. He bites the lobe above. He brings up a hand to warm the side furthest from him. The expanse warms his fingers, otherwise chilled by the cold. 

“Do you think the house might be better?” Will says with a swallow, doing his best to keep the illusion of dry, practical Will. 

“What, you mean you aren’t warm enough?” asks Nigel, smiling when he feels that relaxed pulse gain speed against his palm. Will gives a wincing smile. He has a mouth for smiling, when he lets himself. Different from Gabi’s, even if their eyes sparkle with similar intensity, thought bent on whatever instrument or problem in hand. The freshly shaved face still isn’t a woman’s, but Nigel is finding that less important day to day. He kisses Will again, and delights in locking the car to Will’s protest. 

Steaming up the windows is universal - even his shy violet for a husband can get into the spirit of _that_ , and he does, leaning into his grasp, soft and first and then biting, taking. He dares to touch the lapels of his suit, clutching like it’s a curtain to draw aside. Hands wander, breath mingles, and while Nigel and Will both lament the smell of the cigarettes between the two of them, and the necessity of a shower, it’s also what bridges the otherness of each other, and it tastes unexpectedly good. 

Let someone try to make fun of him now, or discourage him from what he wants - Nigel with his impractical desire to be more than the son of factory workers. Nigel with his crash course to a prison on one border or another if he keeps living the way he’s taught himself to. Nigel Graham nee Paraschiv, newly minted American, old mint criminal, perpetually built to love something in pleasure or in pain. 

( _The smell of methanol in the little cars of Ploiești, or the bakery downstairs burning their croissants, or the waters of Lake Cernica at the docks in Bucharest as your first marriage ends with the peppery gunpowder smoke - you can forget those things with the unfortunate perfume of Marlboro Reds, and enjoy it._ ) 

\---

The road to becoming Will Graham’s wedded partner has been a strange one. If asked why he’s done it at all, and people are _certainly_ asking with greater frequency by the day, Nigel shrugs instead of recounting all the details, and is flippant. Typical Nigel. Canonical Nigel. 

“They’re good looking,” he tells his mother before leaving Bucharest, not quite brave enough to say _he’s good looking_ at first, just in case this is a mistake. Just in case she’s going to find something else to be disappointed about. ( _Some variant of you just looking for ways to irritate her, like you don’t feel the same about her. Stupid cunt. You’ll have to arrange flowers for her birthday now that you can’t take them yourself to abandon in a hurry._ ) Nigel feels bad about that in hindsight, but he’ll have other opportunities to invoke an old-fashioned Orthodox tongue-lashing about going to Hell or some such nonsense at a later date. He’s certain that he’s going to hell for a wide variety of things, but sleeping with an attractive man that one is in a perfectly legal marriage with is not even making waves. 

“He’s easy on the eyes,” he tells Jack Crawford, who clearly thinks the entire story is bullshit, and that Nigel is definitely some other man, perhaps the one that Will confesses to choosing him for. This nettles his temper, but Agent Crawford merely rolls his eyes at this, either too fixated on his own understanding of the situation, or too straight to ever consider Will something that transcends gender norms in beauty. 

That Nigel even thinks that sentence is enough evidence for him that he’s at least a little gay. That he has to consciously keep from getting aroused in the mornings against another man’s hip is perhaps the nail in that particular coffin. One can’t get drunk on cold water, and it’s stupid to pretend as they say at home. 

“He’s got all the qualities that I’m looking for in a spouse,” he tells Jimmy Price, Will’s enthusiastic co-worker in the parking lot of the courthouse, rolling the points of his toes in their shoes against the icy pavement. Jimmy cheekily replies that apparently Nigel has all the ones Will is looking for too, and only smiles to himself rather than continue to explain.

When faced with Will taking off his clothes to take a shower in the hallway, halfway out of his button-up and toes gone rosy with the cold of the wooden floor, looking nervously as though he’s not sure he can ask what he wants to ask, after necking to the point that the condensation inside the old Volvo starts trying to bead, Nigel knows perfectly well why he’s here. 

Will Graham wants someone to take care of him, even if he’s a mess. Nigel wants Will Graham, and his remarkable easy understanding, and his darker impulses that the news and the tabloids flirt with, and that the man himself tries to hide, but Nigel sees it and sees someone that can understand him the way that Gabi wouldn’t. Couldn’t. Will Graham takes care of what’s his, the way Nigel does. Will Graham isn’t pretentious, even if he likes the occasional luxury, and he’s not embarrassed by that, just as Nigel is. Will Graham has a beautiful neck that falls into a well-kept line of shoulders, chest, abdomen, and the divots of a Adonis belt at the waistline, a fine man that Nigel is proud to be chosen by. 

Honesty. Mutual interests. Hopefully copious amounts of sex someday since he’s opened his trading options to both genders, though Nigel’s not putting any money down on it for right this very minute. Sounds like a concrete relationship to him. 

“Are you going to want to shower now?” Will asks, hedging around what he’s actually asking. 

Nigel smiles, unhesitant. Maybe he’ll put a couple dollars down anyway - seems a sexual sea change is in progress.

“I think we’re both going to shower now,” he says with a wink. “Unless you’re wanting to put on a nightgown and hide under the covers?” 

Will’s face blazes at this, younger in his embarrassment, even if his face suggests a very adult annoyance. He looks like he’s going to give one of his pithy little retorts, so Nigel decides that’s quite enough of that, and takes the wheel. Sea changes require force. He thinks so anyway - he’s never quite managed to become a sailor, but he’s still got some years left to correct that. 

“Look, if you’re ok with this, you’re welcome to join me, but it’s almost a hundred year old house and the stall isn’t exactly--”

Nigel takes his blazer off, and his shirt off, and soon his pants, no longer listening. It’s unpleasant and icy in the house, but he strides quickly forward to corral Will in the bathroom’s steam until they disappear in the haze of it. The remainder of the clothes fall away, though Will charmingly still steps out of his trousers with the gym class etiquette of one taught to avoid eye contact and to choose the furthest stall from a neighboring man at the urinal. The shower curtain parts for them in a loud rattle of rings to be in the hot water, and they let their hands wander when hair gets wet, and the chill races down the drain, and there’s no more excuses to not be in each other’s space. 

The possibility of sex is new to their whirlwhirl dance between perfect strangers and spouses, but mostly the bodies are new to each other - no need to rush this, despite his earlier protestations to himself. Make it familiar, and routine. Make it like they’ve been showering together since Nigel’s first day in Bucharest, and Will doesn’t play the cello but he does play people with written words, and sour lemon-tart comments, and it’s beautiful in a way that Nigel’s amateur but appreciative ear loves his husband’s thoughts. 

Literal space necessitates that they get used to it anyway. There’s not room to pussyfoot around about it, feet awkwardly catching each other, shoulder checking each other with grins. He does suppose, brushing against the tiled wall again and wincing against the water against it, that maybe Will was trying to tell him it was a small shower stall. 

“Are you open to remodeling?” Nigel asks when he nearly trips reaching for the soap. Will is very neatly against his chest, a warm strip of wet skin pressed against his shoulder, side, and thigh, dedicatedly looking away from the greying hair there, but leaning a bit into it as well. 

Nigel does his damned best to treat it as brotherly a motion as he can, but assuming the end goal is to still fuck for life with said brother, and...well, Christ, this attempt at gentlemanly behavior took a very strange turn. Nigel decides amorous motion it is, and fuck whatever he was thinking before, it was clearly a shit thought. 

He leans his chin onto Will’s shoulder. 

“What, too into your personal space?” Will asks with his usual thorny sensitivity. “I did try to warn you.” 

“No,” Nigel replies, enjoy the pressure of the collarbone at his chin, “but there’s not really anything for you to grab onto, and one of us is going to fall riding cock one of these days without something to brace for impact,” he says as casually as he can, but laughs at the end when Will just barks with a surprised laugh of his own, no longer worried about being naked, or appropriateness. 

“Just thinking of my health?” asks Will, and pushes water out of his hair that falls between them. His ears are pink from the heat, or maybe from the press of Nigel against his backside. All good things. 

“Or ways to murder you,” he replies, forcing back the impulse to rock forward, “though fuck, what an awesome way to go out.” 

Will doesn’t seem bothered by the implication, and merely suggests which side of the showerhead will actually knock him unconscious the most quickly if he wants to go that route, while watching Nigel rinse soap from his arms. “In case you’re looking for tips,” he adds. 

“Well not that one,” Nigel says, teasing once more with an innuendo for every occasion, and Will looks like he’d like to either quietly die, or very loudly by bathroom fixture as suggested.

\---

The weekend is mostly more of the same, only Nigel has the distinguishment of being a husband instead of a fiance - kindly get fucked, he thinks to Jack Crawford wherever he’s found himself. Against all the odds, and Will’s ever-present stress between the arrest of Frederick Chilton and their signing the documents, they go home to the dogs, they get warm in the shower until the water heater has had enough of their screwing around aimlessly and freezes them out, and they enjoy takeout steakhouse rib-eyes and potatoes that have to be reheated because they spend too much time feeling out each other’s skin instead of properly consummating their nuptials between the car and the bathroom. 

( _You don’t let it bother you, even if the possibility of eternally feeling like you’ve been kicked in the cock comes to mind while getting dressed, still resolutely abstaining. Will wasn’t ready. You don’t know if you were either. You will know next time. You hope he does too._ ) 

They curl into bed after late night walks, as close as they can. “It’s allowed now, if you worry about that sort of thing,” Nigel gruffly says on Saturday night when they’re shuffling into the best configuration that they can. “Married and all. I never really did ask if you were the church type, I guess.” 

“It was always allowed,” Will says, twisting his wedding band absently, much as Nigel does in the courthouse parking lot. “But I’m not always really good at telling what’s allowed and what isn’t, so I don’t do anything.”

He doesn’t say much after that, thinking. 

Nigel squeezes Will, until he sighs and relaxes. Not allowed until it’s too late to undo it then, Nigel guesses. He can work with that. Nigel has never hesitated to take exactly what he wanted when he thought it was time. Marriage doesn’t change his perception of himself, even if it does make him better at waiting, the second time even more so than the first. 

( _You know all the mistakes now. You just have to know how to avoid them this time instead, and fuck, that’s an exhausting thought._ ) 

Mornings continue to start with coffee and cigarettes. Nigel can kiss Will without asking now, not needing the transition of smoking. 

Will’s mouth tastes like the sourness of sleep and the breath caught there in the morning, in the absence of the nicotine smoke - same as the women he’s been with, likely just the same as his own. So another point where being a man doesn't seem to make much of a difference to his appreciation of Will. It’s comforting, learning which parts remain the same, and that they’re _both_ moving forward. He can touch Will’s hair and pull it to make his mouth open wider, invite Nigel in deeper. Maybe given another week, they can get past second base, and apply for shared benefits and mutual funds, you know, as married people do. 

\---

Nigel’s perception of himself, while unchanged by Will ( _save for your patience_ ), or Gabi ( _save for your self-possesion_ ), or his parents ( _save for your values_ ) decades ago and all the people that influence him in between, is incredibly tried by what is supposed to be a simple stop at the gas station on their way back from Tysons Corner and a Monday afternoon spent considering cars. Will, knowing that two people at least now know he is married, or engaged to be married, becomes very insistent that Nigel be able to leave the house in case Will has to go back to work, or in case Will just doesn’t come home, or if the car explodes into flames something. 

“Is that likely?” asks Nigel, striding around to his side of the car. 

“The last year has told me anything is likely, no matter the odds,” Will replies, keys jingling in hand, his characteristic look of doom crossing his face.

Nigel nods, and rolls down the window to feel the crisp air nip at his face. He toys with the novelty of buying the largest American truck that mankind has allowed themselves to create like some diesel terror machine. He toys with a Jaguar, which he can afford, even if it’s flashy. He even toys with a little Alfa Romeo, like he plans to go touring, and can take Will with him. There’s mountains in the West, he tells himself, palming at the map on his phone. There’s places to go where maybe Will can fucking relax, and Nigel can add another degree of separation from his life before now. 

It’s about 5 pm in the quitting time traffic, and Will has strolled into the convenience store while the gas pump works at the side of the car. ( _“It’s an_ important _gas station,” Will snorts when he leaves, and you consider asking if Americans are really so into oil that they’ve literally turned the pumps into sights of cultural significance, but he’s already halfway across the parking lot._ ) Nigel remains in the cab, casually leaning back in his seat, leg crossed and foot pressing idly at the side of the stick shift. Boring. So very boring, waiting outside, but Nigel supposes it’s practical. In his youth, he would have tried his hand at stealing a vehicle left on its own. 

He’s further between thoughts of how ridiculously large the petrol stations are in the United States, and just how fucking big is the state of Virginia anyway. 

( _Answer in a phone search: smaller than Romania. Minnesota is similar in landmass._ ) 

Near to him, caddy corner to Will’s Volvo, a very sleek black car pulls into the space just in the corner of Nigel’s vision. He looks at it for a moment, likes the clean lines and sloping frame, and thinks he knows the logo, but isn’t sure. They’ve been to half a dozen dealerships today and he’s bound to have seen it. It’s expensive, whatever it is - Nigel has a nose for it, and Nigel likes the occasional expensive thing when it’s practical after all. When the owner steps out, he looks back down to his phone, avoidant of being seen gawking. 

( _New phone search: what is the_ **_B_ ** _logo? Answer: Bentley._ )

He looks back up - something about the outfit of the car driver compels him to. Grey and black, with streaks of windowpane red. _Very_ bold choices that Nigel would never wear, but can appreciate. He’s come to expect the standard suits and ties around here so close to the country’s capital, but this is very different, very fucking different indeed. He has half a mind to get out, clap the asshole on the shoulder, and tell him he’s doing the world a service, but also that it’s pretty ugly. 

Warring impulses fighting for dominance. Nigel suspects Will would appreciate it if he just didn’t do anything that required reflection to this extent - that’s what they keep Will around for. 

Nigel smirks, and stares at the face above what seems to be a silk floral tie. It takes only a moment for the smirk to fall away. He’s always been told he has exceptional vision, especially for a person who’s been black out drunk as much as he has in his lifetime. 

He stares a bit longer. 

No way. _By his cunt of a mother_ , there’s no way. 

He looks down at his phone. 

( _New phone search: how long do you live after seeing your clone? Does the secret world government arrive to remove you from civilization and let the impostor take over? Do you have a death match for who has rights to your face? Answer: no results. Try something more specific._ )

( _New phone search: American cloning technology. Answer: The best science startups to invest in this year--_ ) 

Nigel doesn’t know if he’s ever had a panic attack before. Always sounded like kind of a pussy’s reaction to fairly normal stimuli, probably because mental health education is on a similar progressive track as the Eastern Orthodox Church, and Nigel’s grown into an adult between literal war zones while extolling the merits of how best to clean the barrel of fully automatic firearms, and nothing can scare him, no sir, just abandonment apparently. 

And as of today, the image of himself as an upper class gentleman driving a car that he whole-heartedly thought was cool for the span of 30 seconds before he realized it was probably the modern era adaptation of a horse carrying one of the horsemen of the Apocalypse, and he now must come to terms with being a lot less unique than he thought just even ten minutes ago. 

Which brings us to the moment, in which the lightbulb comes on. “Oh God, Oh God, Hannibal’s here, Hannibal’s already here,” the weak-necked bathroom intruder had said, before soundly being put down for the evening for drawing a weapon on Nigel’s now husband. “Hannibal?” Agent Crawford had asked, as one asks a cobra “King, Egyptian, or Indian?” like they aren’t all fucking venomous snakes. “Doctor Lecter?” asked Jimmy Price, as charmed as a chatty shopgirl at the possibility of scandal. “You reminded me of someone that I thought I wanted,” Will said in the glow of a screen, thin, white, and looking out into the void of a camera hoping to see something in Nigel that he can cling to.

The man at the pump sees him. Pauses. Pauses longer. There’s the imagined sound of an engine trying to come online somewhere in the background of traffic on the streets, and the hustle of cars in and out of the station, but always fancy-suit stares at him, mouth slightly agape, brows heavy with the weight of his thoughts. 

Nigel swallows, grits his teeth, and cracks his neck.

( _New phone search: Dr. Hannibal Lecter._ ) 

He doesn’t really get to look at it. The nondescript green of Will’s jacket and grey hat come into view through the windshield, head down and carrying a plastic bag in one hand with a sour look, and Nigel unbuckles his seatbelt like he’s planning to jump from the flaming helicopter of this particular encounter. He knows it’s flaming, because fancy-suit Nigel turns a horrified gaze from Nigel to look at his husband with something that tries to scatter it’s intent into inscrutable store-clerk politeness, but not before it can throw it’s avarice and envy aside. 

Another aspirational man, then. Nigel didn’t fare so well against the last one that took a fancy to his wife. He absolutely would throw a match into the petrol tank before letting it happen twice in less than a year. He pulls a cigarette out from the pocket of his jacket, lights up, and steps out into the cold of the evening, black boots disturbing the rainbow mess of gasoline in the melt-water puddles along the sides of the car. 

One doesn’t get to meet themselves everyday, and Nigel, in spite of everything, is excited after a sleepy winter waiting for his life to grow bigger once more. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> .  
> .  
> .  
> .  
> I promise I'm done using dramatic closes to the chapters now. 
> 
> As an aside, thank you so much for your patience, and more so in the coming weeks. Life is looking very busy this spring, and I'll be taking sometime to wrap up works in progress that are close to completion. I will have more Hares as soon as possible. <3


	8. a gas station of portentous fate

Will never suspected that a Shell station was going to become a pivotal location in his life. 

In fact, he’s kind of offended by it. 

Given the opportunity to screen the location of where Portentous Things Happen, it’s likely he would request something a little bit different. Entirely different. Distinctly not here. Characters in movies get to be in the city core, set against old buildings, neon, and creeping urbanity. Characters in novels get to enjoy profound contrast, perhaps traveling through forests, solving mysteries against Gothic Victorian splendor, or vagabonding with other reckless wandering types on narrow roads. Narrative demands memorability. Narrative also demands unleaded. 

Judging by the number of times he ends up in them doing auspicious things, it appears getting rid of a gas station is not be an option. Accepting that as fact, he’d at least appreciate making it somewhere with a little more charm - maybe one of the little mom and pop stations from near the precinct he had done his police service, or in a remote location with nothing but the ugliness of the pumps and a corner store to silhouette the event rapidly unfolding before him. Something appropriately cinematic, to match the increasing absurdity of his year. 

But no. It’s a standard Shell station in Tysons Corner. The garbage bin in the back of the parking lot is overly full. The snow melt is browning, and has at least three discarded lottery tickets in it. There’s gum on the doorstep and an ugly, damp rug to wipe feet off with. The magazine rack is full of cheesecake semi-nudes, condo advice, and the promise of romance from beyond. ( _Beyond the craggy remnants of the Berlin Wall like Narnia was on the other side? Beyond time-space, perhaps? You’re not writing anything off._ ) 

The cashier that looks at him like some sort of sex criminal when he buys the magazine that ultimately leads him to Nigel is on shift this evening. She says nothing when he buys his things, but Will knows she recognizes him, looks very studiously at his purchases for signs of perversity, and considers asking him if he needs Jesus. 

( _Yes, probably, though you don’t know if there’s room in your marriage for another man, circumstances as they are with the one that’s physically there, and the other that’s never far from your thoughts. Sorry, Christ, you think idly, leaving your spare change in the tray, like a bribe._ ) 

With all the cosmically improbable incidences in his life over the last few months, Will fists two lottery tickets in hand, reminded by the trash in the snow and bought to distract the cashier from suggesting local churches to him, and tries to send whatever chaotic energy he’s emitting into them. May as well make some lemonade out of all these lemons, right?

Walking out to the image of Nigel getting out of the car, looking tensely at a black Bentley Arnage and it’s patterned horror of a driver, Will suspects he should have accepted Christ immediately after all, or not raised the ante any further with chaos than it already is. 

He closes his eyes and rubs them, but nothing changes when they open again. 

_Hannibal_ , comes the thought.

After that, the ache that his name precedes. 

“Fuck,” he sighs almost silently, the telltalle white of breath in the cold air spelling it out anyway.

“Time to go, sweetheart,” Nigel says in a loud voice, giving voice to the next of Will’s thoughts. He’s twirling a fresh cigarette like he’s not at a gas station with half a dozen signs telling him specifically **not** to twirl a cigarette around flammable gases, and striding forward purposefully. So he knows at least a little bit that this is a problem. “It never does any good to make a scene in public, does it?”

“No, it doesn’t,” comes the muttered automatic reply, dread growing. Will takes a deep breath, and stalks back to the driver side door, whiskey bottles, chips, and lottery tickets chucked into the seat. “Unless you’re into that I suppose. Then it’s half the fun.” 

Nigel doesn’t appear to be having a good time, if the dark crease of his brows downwards are anything to go by. Will certainly isn’t, so in this he guesses that their marriage is in perfect synchronicity. 

The cigarette smokes a little. “Should you have that lit out here?” he adds stupidly, because the alternative is acknowledging what’s about to unfold, and hyperfixating on the wrong dilemma seems to be his modus operandi. The person across from them has made it pivotal to his and Will's friendship. 

Nigel looks heavenward in response to that, or gas station awning-ward as the case stands, and takes the longest drag that he’s ever seen someone take, and release it into the air, all the while side eyeing Hannibal and his car. Fair. Will is probably going to do the same, just as soon as he’s reasonably confident he’s not going to cause an implosion from lighting up. 

Speaking of implosions, he looks to the Bentley - sleek, immaculately clean despite the snow and slush, but with the telltale splatter of mud at the wheel wells. His suspicion grows at this. Perhaps a drive to Will’s house had been in order, and finding nothing to see, a trip to the gas station to replace the wasted fuel.

Hannibal has a lot of gall to try visiting. How arrogant after everything that’s happened. 

( _How desperate he must have felt to try, drawn from his position to make the first move._ ) 

Will, against his better judgement, rubbing his palms against his jeans, looks to Hannibal who has moved closer to stand with one hand in the pocket of his coat and the other relaxed at his side in the illusion of casualness. The gas pump clicks along behind him and the overhead radio belts out a commercial in the ignorance of daily errands, unaffected by its destiny to be the backdrop to this moment. 

Grey, black, and red plaid. A stately grey peacoat atop that. Black gloves, not the kind that hide evidence of fingerprints, sweat, the carbon of a human existence, but the kind that imply he’s above those sorts of things. Will hates them. Will thinks of how light they are, careful of the delicate hairs at the temples of his forehead, firm on the sides of his neck when he needs his perception _open_ and _clear_. 

“Hello, Will,” says Hannibal.

And like that, the parts of Will that he’s training himself to ignore come back into play. 

( _You know, the ones that make you wonder who likes you, who could. The ones that make you think that there’s something wrong with you, looking for affection in things and people remind you most of Hannibal, the need to_ **_replace, replace, replace_ ** _. You were just starting to fix it. New hardware, old frame, the same you from before he rearranged what things you fear._ ) 

( _Not the parts that lean into your violence, but surely that’s coming._ ) 

“Well? On your way in, or out, Doctor Lecter?” he says with a rasp, like he doesn’t already know the answer to that. “Isn’t this a bit outside your home visit territory these days? Generally not good to do house calls before you know if someone is home.” 

Hannibal...and _damnit_ , it really _is_ him, eyes darker now in the sodium lights of the station and the sun disappearing into a rosy bordered night. He’s dropped a veil of politeness on his face as Will's seen him do in court, or in the view of Alana and Jack and any of the others ever paraded past Will’s enclosure in prison. It was never an entirely knowable face - the plains of it sharp and cut off from the tells of the average person, save for the tell that he has to cover _something_ , but it watches Will now with a noted dedication. 

Nigel comes to Will’s side, his own hands in his pockets, silvery hair yellowed by the overhead glow of the giant shell on the station’s sign and pylons, and the lowering sun. He has opted to ignore Will's commentary, and is still industriously smoking. ( _Does_ **_anybody_ ** _listen to you?_ ) Hannibal watches this as well, with a strange, glittering fervor that cuts the tiniest of holes in his veil, and beneath that, fire. It follows an absent minded tap of ash to the ground, where it disappears into the dirty water there from the melted ice and snow. 

He is drawing conclusions, Will thinks. Some right, some wrong, but unalterably drawn. 

“On the way out, as the circumstances are,” Hannibal replies at length, focusing on him, but continuing to periodically dart a glance to Nigel, like he can’t quite fathom the puzzle of him. Magnetically drawn as one feels the reflection of a mirror on the wall, present, unintentional, incredibly distracting. Will guiltily is glad that it isn’t him having to come to terms with the profound lie that every person is unique - he has quite enough issues with how singular he is without additional reinforcement from idioms told to children. That it is _Hannibal_ learning that he isn’t singular, despite the accolades, pedigree, and man eating, is definitely a twist that Will wouldn’t have placed bets on. 

Hannibal blinks, and tilts his head, continuing. “House calls have fallen out of favor in recent years, but you know I like to check in. You need checking in on occasionally.” 

“One would think you’d avoid the trouble.” 

Hannibal smiles. “My experience is that it doesn’t do much good to avoid troubling things. I find it’s better to look at them directly,” he says, but seems to take a moment to calculate what he wants to follow that with, face unmoved but eyes again on Nigel. 

Will can almost see it, now that he knows what he’s looking for - he's seen how Hannibal's conversations shape themselves. Hannibal and his liquid measuring cups, watched as they come to stillness on the countertop, red wine or rice vinegar or some other sweet-bitter-sour thing slowing to inert pools. How much more, is it enough, is it past what he needs. Will’s watched it across from the kitchen island in times it was meant for cooking, not a method of living with other human beings. But Hannibal uses words like he uses ingredients, and this dialogue is a new and unknown recipe. 

He wants to ask. He doesn’t want to ask. He thinks he already knows, and Will would say he’s probably half-right, even if it hurts to admit even privately. 

“Leave anything fun this time?” Will retorts, distracting himself from worrying the corner of his mouth with a sneer. “You’ll have to forgive me, I didn’t expect you. We’re not really on a doctor-patient basis these days to merit expectation, but it doesn’t seem to have stopped you.” 

“We’re certainly on some kind of basis,” Hannibal says quietly, the hissing of a snake in high grass, unseen, but a known and present danger. He nods at Nigel. “I hear _congratulations_ are in order. Am I to presume this is your... _husband_?” and the way he asks it makes Will feel oily and seen. 

A snort to his left. Will looks to the man at his side, quiet up to this point. That Nigel’s first interjection to the conversation is a snort is comically comforting, leaning against the car like it’s his own. It is, Will supposes. Common law shared marital assets and all. He has no perception of Hannibal being anyone more threatening than the average car salesman, and he's been twirling circles around them all day. 

Nigel gives a cheeky wave, the gold of his wedding band glinting in the evening light. “Presume away,” he says. “Will, darling,” he adds, smiling but also menacing in the way he affixes his own gaze to Hannibal’s while turning to Will, “why don’t you introduce us properly, seeing as it’s something you must have meant to do.”

A breakdown, as translated by Will, emphasis his own: 

_Nice to meet you -_ this is neither nice, nor a meeting. _Why don’t you introduce up properly_ \- tell this fuck who I am. _Something you must have meant to do_ \- you fucking monkey, you said he was similar, not exact. Marital problems usually wait a year, or seven if you insist on holding out like a bitch and not facing them. This seems like something you handle ahead of time, not three days after.

Will rubs his eyes again, and looks back up at Hannibal, who's own mouth growing a charming tilt from across the pavement. 

“I don’t think that’s necessary, do you?” asks Hannibal, all amusement now that the shock is passing. “Names are sometimes inconsequential in the face of their meaning.” 

He looks between the two of them. “You do move fast, Will. Very rude, not letting people know, but I suppose I understand,” he says instead, giving Will a look that would be better served from the chairs of his office, mezzanine of books listening with nothing but their paper to soak it in. "How long did it take you to find someone that looked just like me?"

“But I suppose I understand your hesitation,” Hannibal adds lightly, pointed. “ _What_ would people _think_?” 

It's poisonous, how he says that. Will knows what some of them think, but he’s not exactly interested in a Gallup poll that amounts to “were you jerking it to the face of your therapist before or after the attempted assassination?” which isn’t really the whole story, but it’s definitely the conclusion people like to reach. Will is a profiler, not a PR expert - he’s always earning a failing grade in appearances. 

What Hannibal thinks is beyond him. Hannibal’s interpretation of things is often so convoluted, that Will suspects that not many people at all know what he really thinks, and it’s always been that way, forever, amen. ( _Forget the idea of shared confidences, companionship, the idea of being authentically valued. Even if those were ever true, how he uses them to saw at you is a step further than you can perceive - you don’t harm people to instruct them. Or at least you used to not._ )

His mouth twists into a tight line at this thought, and sighs through his nose. 

That frustration it seems is what properly gets Nigel going, who draws up from his slouch into the person Will watched strike a man and disassemble a gun like a family pastime. Pack politics suit him, and he's allowed Will to be his pack. 

“ _You_ seem to be thinking quite a fucking lot about it,” Nigel says between teeth worrying the end of his cigarette, like there’s nothing he’d like to do so much as to bite it in two. “Never been traded up before? I won’t waste half a shit on telling you my name, seeing as I’ve heard yours plenty and don’t care to again.”

“Quality brands tend to become the key household term, yes,” Hannibal replies, not at all swayed from his smile. “It’s gratifying to hear my name has been in Will’s mouth.”

Will just about goes beet red, but Nigel merely takes another drag to let loose and grin around. “Oh, everybody’s but yours, actually, but whatever - mine’s gotten quite comfortable there.” 

A white lie, and an underhanded flirtation to Will, but a lie that seems to take a toll on Hannibal’s attitude, a little chip in the glass rim that cuts the mouth that touches it. It feels so indecent to even imply, or that Hannibal wouldn’t think it’s just funny. Poor Will Graham, bereft and abandoned of attachments, crashing himself against the rocks of Hannibal’s face in spite of everything. Rote, vulgar, not even worth a study. 

Hannibal assesses again, face twitching in brief displeasure as if Nigel was the service staff, or a small child, and wishes them to be silent. Nigel steps a little forward, and lets his smoke push between the three of them while Hannibal’s face transforms with each step into a remote place, even further out into the growing dark than Will has seen before. Perhaps this is what the Chesapeake Ripper looks like - it's a revelation to see it. 

“You know, I’m actually happy that we’re all here like this,” Nigel continues, very glib. “Crawford made this sound all very nefarious, but all I see is an opportunity to clarify the situation, and what a damn shame it is to let those slide.” 

“Doctor Lecter’s a great fan of opportunity,” Will rejoins bitterly, the thought _Hannibal_ coming through again and dancing on the back of his tongue.

“Something else we have in common,” says Nigel with a nod and a look upwards. 

Timing, being key and also something of a bitch, begins to trouble the edges of their scene. Will’s life isn’t charmed enough to happen in a void, and as such he has to bear witness to people averting their eyes, frowning at Nigel’s cigarette with pointed glances to the red and white **NO SMOKING** signs, and the hindbrain anxiety of being watched. Occasionally, the cashier pokes her head outside, presumably to empty the trash, and yet the overflowing trash persists. _Delinquents_ , she no doubt thinks. _Heathens_ , she could add on, and maybe get back to recommending establishments of faith. 

Will half considers just asking Hannibal directly when future interrogations and tortures will commence as to create some sort of timeline for later. Will would like to be better prepared for this kind of melodrama and stinging commentary next time. Thanks for ruining a perfectly good stretch of days in which nothing terrible happened. Thanks for the reminder that he’s something sliver-sharp to get stuck under the skin. ( _And into your thoughts, and into your bed through other people - crushes, nightmares, husbands._ ) 

Speaking of husbands - they’ve got things to do, somewhere other than the corner near the mall. Will would like to think they don't have time for this. The mail needs to be brought in, and they should be thawing fish for dinner. They’ve got dogs to feed. There’s two walks between now and bed, and two cigarettes to share between that. They’ve got a home to come back to - that feels good to admit to himself, even if it doesn’t match how he feels, Hannibal in one eye, and Nigel in the other. He wants to go home, and he's not sure the best way to head that direction. 

He twists his wedding band. 

No matter how small the motion, Hannibal still sees it because he is constantly looking for them, his mouth going firm. 

But fate steps in, wielding Will's mortification like a club. A little red sedan pulls in behind Will’s car - “Are you guys still fueling up?” says it’s owner in her most obnoxious of tones, blonde head hanging out the window and looking thoroughly put out. 

Will is briefly reminded that he hates people, and wonders if there’s a way to never casually interact with them again. Intellectually? Sure. Online when he’s feeling lonely? Absolutely - he’s made a whole production of that. Sexually? Working on that as quickly as possible, or as quickly as Will is capable of. Marital duties, to match those marital assets, or use the ones he has been told are attractive if he wants to take the analogy a step too far. 

Nigel turns his head whip-fast without moving a solitary inch away from Hannibal to inform her, “Yes, we are absolutely fueling up, and we might make a night of it. Would you care to ask the people on the other sides of the pump, or is there something about these two that gets your knickers wet?” 

Will winces; expected, but still crude. “Christ, Nigel, let’s just-” but Nigel’s not really paying attention at this point, torn between aggravations. 

Hannibal himself upon hearing this announcement looks torn between apologizing, taking advantage of the distraction to rip the cigarette out of Nigel’s hand and burn it into his eye for the presumption, and also telling the woman that they’ll be making a night of it after all, and thank you for providing the protein for the appetizers. 

This is all met with a “humph!” and the sedan pulling away to park in front of the convenience store. Blonde woman frowns at their foolishness. Blonde woman meets cashier, and begins sharing mutinous looks and wild hand gestures. Time to go, thinks Will, for more reasons than emotional ones. 

Nigel doesn’t spare them a second thought, though he does look at Will very briefly. “We’re all great friends here, aren’t we? That’s the impression I’m under,” Nigel says, turning back to Hannibal, equally as cold now. “And friends take their time with each other, don’t they Will? Shouldn’t be any trouble at all to properly explain. Make a different night of it over drinks. I don’t go in on fancy shit, but your Doctor Lecter here seems the type, and we can get all the congratulations over and done with.”

“Sounds like dinner,” says Hannibal in rising humor, head at a curious angle, considering in a way that Will knows Nigel doesn’t know what exactly that it’s considering. 

“Sounds like something not discussed at the Shell, for God’s sake,” Will says finally with a frustrated press of his hands to his hair.

Hannibal gives a very shallow bow, hands spread at his sides. _By your leave_ , it says in saccharine tones. “I think we have rather a lot to catch up on, don’t we? If you’re still industriously dodging Jack, I find myself with time tomorrow - you should fill it. Call it an opportunity of another sort,” says Hannibal with a sweep of an arm, half for emphasis, and half to wave away the smell of the smoke, no doubt. “To _clear up_ the details. A more pleasant exit interview - since we’re not on doctor-patient terms these days."

( _Say no. To show him you’re capable._ )

Will frowns. It's more complex than that. 

The time is offered earnestly, as Hannibal is earnest with his appointment book in a way he is with nothing else. Time blocked off in tidy rows of Spencerian letters, ink blotted carefully, thirty minute segments in between each to account for the necessities of travel, comfort, and the caprice of chance. There’s undoubtedly a spot open that he wants for Will and a conversation within it without Nigel, not merely a euphemism for a new _scene of the crime_. It’s repulsive and attractive, the same way sessions had been before the whole thing went purposefully pear-shaped. 

If he doesn’t take this one, Hannibal will find another time, or another time, or another time, and the question then in each unknowable block of the appointment book will be if Will knows the intent of it, or what sorts of tools Hannibal will fill those hours with instead. Will Nigel be alone? Here, yes, is an opportunity to see the playing field once more, after a long rest, and many words spoken elsewhere that he can’t know without asking. Hannibal Lecter wants to post-mortem his time in prison, and probably pre-mortem his marriage.

( _Say yes. To show him he can’t kill everything you like._ )

“If Nigel here, of course, is amiable to it?” Hannibal tacks on like it’s funny, and he’s landed a good hit. 

He hasn’t. “See? You know my name after all,” Nigel hums, rolling a shoulder, and if that doesn’t push Hannibal to his most rigid posture yet, Will would say he thinks it would splinter his bones to stand any straighter. 

“Tomorrow,” Will nods. 

“At 7:30, if you’d please," Hannibal adds. "My house - I suspect you’d prefer not to return to the practice office, given our last dealings there.” 

Will nods again, stomach turned to lead beneath his ribs. 

“So glad we could have this conversation on such short notice, Doctor Lecter,” Nigel replies with an exaggerated tip of his hand, ash scattering. “It’s always good to see that while there’s no accounting for taste, there is for preference.” 

There's a pause. 

It’s so audaciously rude, Will’s half convinced Hannibal might just give up the secrecy of murdering a significant number of people yearly right then and there just to ensure the matter is dealt with. His eyes are two coals in his head, unlit and ready to burn, but Nigel has laid out his bet, and as such, Nigel walks to the car not caring if it’s matched, or if the violence crawling under Hannibal’s skin will find an outlet today. 

Aghast, but clearly with nothing improving and the conversation at a halting end, Will turns to do the same. 

“I look forward to it, Will,” Hannibal says tightly, and when Will turns to look at his one more time, he is crushing his key fob between his fingers. 

“I don’t know if _I_ do,” Will replies, sad. He steps into the car, more concerned with putting a door between them than the slush on his boots, or that he’s sat directly on top of his bag from the convenience store. Small price to pay to not give view to those small human errors, when Hannibal's already seen him make a fool of himself so many other ways.

Will glances out at the image of Hannibal next to the sleek black of his own car, watching calmly but unhappy as they start the car, pull into drive, and leave. Out to the asphalt, over a muddy curb, and onto the street full of commuters. One pump freed for the anxious suburbanites of Tysons Corner. Next to him in the now blue-pink of the setting sun, Nigel watches too - Will’s face, not Hannibal’s. Will’s not scared of what he sees there, but he also knows there’s something embarrassing in it the way there hasn’t been in his mouth. 

To Hannibal, Nigel’s name probably _is_ inconsequential. No matter the shape and sound of them, they are formed to push his own out. Nigel’s a pretender, and Hannibal need only reclaim laurels he didn’t know he still had to wear. _Doctor Lecter_ , _Doctor Lecter_ , _Doctor Lecter_ , and nary a _Hannibal_ to be heard in Will’s house, save for secret thoughts, and the occasional reminder that he’s opened himself up again to two distinct people, and one is still there against Will's better judgment because he burned his image into Will. 

( _You don’t have to say a name to speak it - it’s with you anyway._ ) 

\---

It’s an awkward car ride, and rightly so. There’s the damp smell of melt water not dried from their shoes, the crinkling of a plastic bag in the back seat whipping in the wind, and an invisible wall down the middle of the car that’s full of questions. They slice between the two of them over the center console, and mute the radio with repressed, sniping thoughts. 

“I guess an explanation is in order,” says Will, when the rolling thunder of the engine and wheels becomes too little to fill the space. 

Nigel stretches long, lean legs, and cracks his neck again. A nervous habit of someone accustomed to shouldering injuries and working out kinks alone. “Shit,” he says, “is an explanation really necessary?” He spreads an arm outside the open car window, the hand there glowing with fresh embers from another Marlboro. Will can just see the tip of it, orange and angry in the night air. He throws his head back as they enter the freeway. 

Will chews the winter dryness of his lips. “I think you’re under the impression of there being more significance to your appearance in my choosing you than there actually is.” 

Nigel smiles, unseen but felt. “I think the fact that you don’t acknowledge the significance is more significant.”

Astute. Will is always nettled when someone is astute enough to understand him when he hasn't fully understood himself, and it surprises him each time Nigel does it. He prays for a distraction, a mild thing that has no additional disastrous encounters, or nascent desires clinging to it.

He looks down to the odometer ( _five miles over the speed limit as god intended_ ), the gas meter ( _full of course_ ), the thin white glow on the top of the steering wheel from passing traffic. He can watch that too if he wants. ( _Daddy said not to, in your first driving lesson growing up, that you’d lean into the lights if you didn’t watch the stripes and lines instead._ ) Nigel sighs, tapping his free hand on the console, the _click-click_ of the ring standing out in the quiet like a turn signal.

“I dislike your Doctor Lecter. Nice car, and a good looking motherfucker if I do say so myself,” he says with a crooked grin, snaggletooth glinting in the traffic lights. Even Will finds the corners of his mouth lifting at the joke. “But he's full of shit.”

Will concedes to that with a nod. “No observances left unmarked, and no offenses left unpunished.” 

He exits the freeway, right turn lights strobing in time with the _click-click-click_ , Nigel thinking with his hands, curling the fingers with a frenzied energy that he seems to want to keep to himself. Someday Will’s going to catch him losing his temper - he knows it’s there, but this is what should be the honeymoon period, and everyone’s on their best behavior because there's no actual honeymoon, until one day they wake up and they’re not. Today’s the first raveling of that. Hannibal has that effect on people, Will thinks with a snort, picking at stitches to see how they fall apart. 

“Hannibal’s a dangerous man,” Will finds himself saying. A warning, having seen the two of them together and their twinned smiling faces hiding snarls. “I don’t know what he’s going to do.” 

“Something obnoxious, I’m sure,” Nigel says, leaning further back in his seat. “Shit, I mean he’s me after all, and I am nothing if not predictable.” 

This is an optimistic view - Will himself hasn’t figured out how to divine Hannibal’s intent on good days, but then, maybe he’s being unfair to Nigel. It could be that he actually _does_ understand Hannibal, one god-gifted cheekbones face to another. Nigel who dresses guns down and dresses up sharp, and holds his own with Jack and Jimmy, and doesn’t do much other than shrug when asked to do something unless he truly doesn’t want to. Feeds the dogs when asked. Usually in a good humor. Not so different from Hannibal, really, save that Nigel is feral where Hannibal is trained. The calculation of what they do changes with their natures. 

The house rolls up where the heads of the dogs peak up from the windows, shadowed by the hall light shining dim and yellow behind them. It’s not quite become a boat in the dark again, but the front room windows sweat with warmth, and there’s a well-lived and worn texture to the floors that creak under their feet, and pick up claw marks like lucky pennies, and have forgotten the damp and soil of the mud dragged in by crime scene cleaners, police, Will’s own naked feet made dirty by illness. 

Will’s determined to keep what he’s reclaimed. Watching Nigel step out of the car and crouch down to greet Buster and Max when they run out the door, he worries all the same how's he going to manage when his own thoughts are as mangled as they are. 

\---

On account of the day not being entirely done with giving Will a hard time, Nigel volunteers for dog watching duty as they trace the edges of the property in the dark, and Will volunteers to cook for the second dinner of their relationship, feeling a need to make the day up to Nigel. If one can make up for a day like this, anyway.

He debones trout with expert efficiency, relieved to have a moment alone. He also reasons with himself that cutting flesh with a knife in isolation is probably not the comfort activity he should be embracing, and maybe he should reexamine his relationship with cooking. After so much time spent ordering out in an attempt to host rather than fully return to old habits, he’s forgotten how to view basic meal prep. The occasional unwitting cannibalism between acting as sous chef and evening meals prior to prison doesn’t really help. Every skin is a potential Andrew Caldwell - all the bones could be a Jeremy Olmstead.

( _Thanks Hannibal, you snort while tapping red pepper flakes and salt on the white meat._ ) 

He forgets to turn down the heat, and chars one of the fillets on the skinless side. A mild annoyance, but officially more than he’s decided he’s equipped to handle. He spoons melted butter over it in a desperate bid to correct it, fails, and instead pours a generous two-to-three-ish fingers of his new bottle of Wild Turkey. _That_ has yet to fail to fix a problem.

About two minutes later, and one boozy finger down, Nigel pours himself one, and they argue about who’s getting the blackened butter-drowned fish. Will plates it for himself. Nigel takes it from the counter with insistence, and simply says that he likes it better this way anyway. It’s complex.

“Burnt food isn’t complex,” Will says, eying the sheen of oil between the flaking meat of the fish. “At least not this burnt.” 

“I know what I like,” Nigel says, and powers through bites like it’s great.

Will drinks another third of his drink with a shrug, and the encounter at the gas station continues to merit no mentions, as does Will’s omissions.

The nighttime rituals continue unaltered. Will dozes while Nigel showers, idly stroking Winston’s ears at the bedside, only a little drunk. Nigel strides out in his lounge pants and shirt still stuck to him in places, torn between water hot and air cold and complaining about it because he wants to talk but doesn't know what about. Space under the blankets is negotiated, and ultimately forgotten when Nigel decides for them that direct contact is the new normal, and Will can only nod that yes, that seems reasonable after sharing showers together and all of his property besides. It's a pleasant adjustment regardless - Nigel treats being the big spoon in their carded configuration like a personal duty, and keeps the warm expanse of him from neck to heels pressed against Will’s back. 

The front drive remains clear and without visitors well past midnight, Will watching the gentle half-light of the night from one eye in tired frustration. He’s not quite sure what he’s expecting, only that he’s expecting something.

“Terribly sorry,” Hannibal could say, strolling in like a particularly persistent hallucination of a menswear model even in the dead of night, “I thought now might be better than Tomorrow. Today. All the same thing, isn’t it Will?” It’s not as if Hannibal doesn’t see erstwhile runs to Wolf Trap to orchestrate destruction as anything other than a recent hobby, and it’s not as if Will doesn’t see Hannibal at all times as a clear and present threat, especially now when he has things again to regret having taken from him.

( _“I think you're more in control now than you've ever been,” says Hannibal, and while the righteousness sears in your bones, you wonder if there’s much you have control of other than yourself._ ) 

He closes his eyes, and pulls his hands to hug his sides. Will doesn’t sleep, but he does drift at the edges of the room, on the icy cold of the porch, in the smell of fresh mint toothpaste and smoky cologne and the cloying nicotine, and adjusts as he always does. 

\---

At what probably is 2 in the morning, Nigel also stirs with a long sigh, tightening his grip around Will in what can only be described as a python squeeze before easing off. Making sure he's still there, that he's still awake. When Will sighs against the pressure, he hums a little in acknowledgement. 

“Still no nighttime visitors?” Nigel rumbles, amused. “You've got me thinking I should be worried. I thought you had an appointment.”

“I do, assuming my husband allows me to go to it,” Will wryly replies, as though that has _ever_ been a problem, or even a phrase he thought he’d say out loud. 

“Oh good,” says Nigel squeezing tight again and rising on one arm to lean over Will. Will pauses and turns his head, curious, but unable to see Nigel’s face in the dark. There’s nothing but the glint of the fine sliver-blonde-brown hairs atop his head, sliding in the way. “Then I shouldn’t be concerned about some fuck walking in on us, handsome ones included.” 

Nigel bends to kiss his neck, the side of his cheek, the rise and fall of his mouth, slightly offset from his own at this angle, but seeking purchase all the same. Permission requested, captain, Will hears in each inquest. Another new attempt at the brick wall of Will and Nigel's stalemate in the bedroom, or an attempt to stake a claim. Will can understand why he would worry about it. Will's assurances aren't very assuring tonight. Will opens his mouth in apology and hesitant affirmation. His husband is a kind man, and Will finds he's desperate to reward him in some way for his leaps of faith. 

Will has always given kisses like they’re a trade agreement, and accepts them as something surprising, an unexpected windfall, like meeting someone else’s dog at the office. “Great!” comes the feeling rising in his gut, the anticipation and happiness of a nice thing happening to him that day. His relationships are so rare, and so spread apart that the sensation probably has more in common with the spectacle of a comet passing through, visible for a couple months before jettisoning themselves into the void of space to presumably not be seen in his lifetime again. Dating hasn’t been great. 

Between reciprocation, and the gentle coaxing to turn onto his back, Will can admit kissing in marriage is undoubtedly better. Nigel bestows his affections where he thinks he can get away with them, stealing breath and time to overthink it. He has rough, callused hands that look for deliberately softer places, like the fine hairs at the back of the neck, or the stretch of skin that begins beneath the arms and terminates in the crook of an elbow - a man accustomed to romance between his own difficult pursuits. Sighs are permission to delve deeper. The retreat of Will’s legs, looking to stretch away and allow Nigel space to draw closer is a path forward. The slide of his tongue past the easing clench of Will’s teeth to coax him is a gift, still unexpected and wonderful, but richer for the promise of many happy returns. 

Will needs external pressures to move past his thoughts, and so too is an external pressure at work here as the flush of arousal starts to build in his gut and his cock. Sex has been a threshold - he supposes an existential threat to it’s potential to happen is probably as good an excuse to plow forward as he’s going to get. There’s a pause when they’re practically sealed to each other, grinding experimentally against one another that a decision is reached. 

( _You’re not necessarily lucky, but it seems Nigel’s about to be. Maybe you’ll give_ **_him_ ** _the lottery tickets, you think, favoring the stretch of your lip pulled between worrying bites with your attention, and a smile that never quite makes it there._ ) 

Will slides his hands under the black of Nigel’s shirt, considering the skin there with his own rough hands, and Nigel gives a particularly wet suck to the underside of his jaw in reply. “Shit,” he hisses, breathing there, hot against his neck.

“I can never quite tell if you swear because you’re emotional or if it’s out of habit,” Will says quietly, hands now hesitating at the first curls of chest hair, foreign, before sliding onwards. The shadow of his arm beneath the fabric feels just as distant as a moon but inescapably present, in his little house, in this hour of his life.

Nigel rewards that with a bite that will bruise, laughing into it. “Both, but I haven’t been this fucking riled up about necking since secondary school, and I’m finding it difficult to be a gentleman.”

Will leans into the burn and the relief of more kisses pressed to each tooth-worried mark. A man of many talents, but not gentlemanly ones, just crude or kind ones, whichever mood he finds himself in. That's alright though - Will didn’t want a gentleman, not when he met Nigel, and not now either. 

“The front room isn’t a black tie affair,” Will replies against the soft hair that's come to rest in his face, sleep mussed and wild. With his eyes adjusted and clear in the dark, Will sees it for what it is - glossy, a little too long, the mane of a lion who has careful paws. 

He nods when Nigel looks up at him, less of a face, instead a pressing question, and _claws_ at the soft sides of Nigel’s chest in answer. 

Nigel raises himself on two arms now, diving back into his mouth like it’s where he belongs, and Will greedily accepts that in the moment. He gives as good as he can offer, pressing and scraping his fingers around the bend of the ribs into the skin of Nigel’s back wanting to know what’s behind them, driving his hips upward and shifting. He hopes, like dinner, and the house, and the utter mess that most things drawn into his gravity, that this will be enough. His expressions of gratitude are poor in comparison to the faith put in him, but it _is_ gratitude. 

They don’t take clothes off, already in motion - it would be like rolling the windows down in a flaming vehicle to get a bit of cool air at this point, honestly, and Will’s afraid to lose his nerve, and Nigel seems determined to cage him in this moment, as wonderful in his passions as his patience. The fabric between their erections chafes with the fervency of their movement, but they’re stoking arousal to the point where Will feels naked anyway, looking at the space between them rather than the man above, exposed in this. 

It’s embarrassing how quick as a couple of experienced men like themselves have gotten to the edge with nothing but the old teenaged giddiness of the feel of someone else’s body. The newness of a male body. The charting of a new landscape only glanced from miles away, as if they didn’t share a name now. He’s almost let the memory fade, unlike the memory of giving and receiving kisses, how good it is to come when you endeavor to. Not as a coping mechanism, but a team sport, like reaching under someone’s skin and favoring the nerves with careful love. 

When their climax comes, it’s shocked out of them both, hot fingered and desperate. He’s an arc of stone, silent where Nigel gives a low groan like he’s surprised, and then they’re water, falling back to the bed which ominously squeaks under the force of their weight. Nigel allows himself to fall particularly heavy into the space nearest to Will's left ear, breathing in the light sweat there and the feeling of Will’s hair on his mouth before rolling to the side. One of the callused hands comes to cup the side of Will’s face, index and middle fingers learning the contours. 

Will closes his eyes to them, choosing to think of them instead of see the shape of the face behind them. 

( _This is your signed permission slip. This is a toe in the water of wading forward, because marriage is a certificate and a legal term until you try to push back the hesitation. There’s still problems, because you wouldn’t be you without them - you could just tell him directly that you want him, talk a big game, but the vulnerability of having your desire seen in two people and not just his is a brittle thing, much more than the desire of your body for his, and the words don’t match what you feel, and you_ **_hate_ ** _liars, yourself included._ )

( _But this? This is allowed._ ) 

When the fingers retreat, it’s safe to look again - lights outside the house the same, and Nigel a dark rise of a person in the bed. Will doesn’t reach for him with his own hand, but it’s a near thing. Instead he rolls to face him instead, an uncommon event in their short history so far, but tonight’s a night for firsts. 

“Thank you,” Nigel says from his throat, low and warm, pushing hair out of his eyes and behind his ears to gently curl there. Just a suggestion of it, uncomplicated from gel or an exacting image. A proud animal's crown. Will wants to feel it. 

“You don’t have to thank me,” Will replies, flexing his fingers unseen. 

“Well then you can thank this bastard instead,” Nigel says with a toothy smile like congratulations are in order, “at the very reasonable price of holy matrimony and a crash course in citizenship terms. Certainly cheaper than therapy.” 

So there's a little envy there after all. “More obvious gratification, in any case," he replies and shuffles closer. 

Will watches as Nigel huff a little laugh at that, and seem to make a study of the bed - blanket rumpled at the foot of it, at least one dog nose looking over the edge curiously at the disruption. Shirt straightened, pillow flattened. Spouse satisfied, self satisfied. He yawns, and purses his lips like he's thinking. 

“Well at least it’s dark,” Nigel says, panting on his back, arm thrown over his eyes and shuffling somewhat awkwardly in his sleep pants. “Black’s a terrible color for getting come on it.” 

It’s sometime around 2 in the morning, and Will laughs, startling the rest of the dogs in their beds, but tired enough to sleep and forget for a bit that things aren’t perfect, and they might transform beyond his control, but he has control of himself and what he does with that is his business. Both their pajama pants are unsalvageable, and Will doubts that Nigel's need for validation is resolved, but he curls close once more, and they rest with nothing more awkward between them than having no clothes. 

\---

The coffee machine is an alarm clock that is beholden to nothing but itself. Regardless if the coffee grounds make it into it, or if the water is replaced, or if Will even wants coffee, it stalwartly offers the opportunity to partake. It would likely be a candidate for the most consistent relationship in his adult life, barring Buster who he has had for the better part of a decade whereas this particular coffee maker has only made it to the five year anniversary. 

He pulls out two mugs and listens to the drip. He considers if it would be too much to ask someone to dart him with an elephant tranquilizer to make up for how exhausted he is. Three hours of sleep is not adequate for a grown man who’s pretty sure if he ever has to break his own thumbs again, they’ll have to replace them with bionic ones before arthritis comes for him. His feet get sore quickly from years of standing on police beats, lectures, and creek beds. The encephalitis has long since passed, but headaches are still harder, and lights at times to bright, or the crows in the trees outside a murmuring of laughter. That sensitivity pounds between his eyes now while Nigel sleeps a little longer, proving just another five years of age is practically an entire new stage of entropy in the face of not resting adequately. Buster and the shepherd mix Jack take Will’s spot in bed with the confidence of explorers, circling and content to steal the warmth from the blankets and Nigel’s back. Will hopes the man enjoys his little living heating pads and opts to not scold the dogs.

His phone, charging on the counter, flashes with the notification light periodically, the tiniest of green dots but obnoxious from the other side of the kitchen. It traditionally portends calls from Jack, texts from Alana, the occasional email from work that somehow merits an _Important!_ Flag, even when it is very much not so. When he worked, he amends. Still thinking about whether or not that resumes that, especially with things as they are between the FBI, Hannibal, and the increasingly public interest in his transition from single to married. 

Nonetheless, duty calls - he grabs it, and reads the lock screen.

**_New message from Hannibal Lecter_ ** **.**

Will almost puts it back down the way one puts down a nice shirt in the department store that is aggressively expensive. Quickly, before someone can see that you had it in your hands. ( _Almost more embarrassed to want it than to find it more than you want to spend._ ) ****

He looks towards the front room, still quiet.

**_Are you still committed to our time tonight?_ ** reads the message, not a single flourish to be seen. Will tries to not feel guilty, looking down at the screen. Not that he hasn't replied, but that he's allowed himself to be in a position to reply at all. 

There’s not anything overtly nefarious about it, even if the older messages are different with hindsight - the last texts between them are several months old, confirming an appointment, questions about his fever, and another asking where he’s gone with Abigail. He’s avoided looking at them and the tangible evidence that things were bad, and still are when he doesn’t go native and hide in his house with his foreign husband like he’s ever had that kind of pretentious money to do so, or a recluse's claim to infamy. He should have just deleted it all from the phone the minute that it’s returned in an evidence envelope, a _most generous_ parting gift from Frederick Chilton upon release. 

It’s not as if he’s ever truly been pushed to the side, even if Hannibal does feel the need to force the game from time to time. Prison and a friendly hitman's overtures at crucifixion don’t stop his invisible hand - why would such an obviously reactive marriage to his machinations be able to? Hannibal likely thinks the whole situation is hilarious, but Nigel’s parting shot the day before also suggests he finds it at least a bit unnerving. Point to Team Graham, even if it’s a truly questionable method of making it. 

**_Are you still committed to our time tonight?_ ** persists on the screen in his hand. Sent at 3:31 am. Will can see it - first thing tapped out after a short night of his own. Hannibal’s never been the sort that requires sleep. Will doesn’t know if time and entropy even know their way to his house, even if he wields it like a cleaver against everyone else. 

But 3:31 am is a lonely time when between mischiefs. 

And that’s what Will needs to know more about, strange feelings, Hannibal's loneliness, or not. He needs to know what to expect next, and how best to beat the house at its own game. 

**_I’ll be there_ **, he types, and fills two mugs for the porch. He can hear the mattress protesting in the front room, and as they've all agreed, it's an appointment, is it not? 


End file.
